In this activity, students will learn about how tornadoes are formed and what they look like. By creating a water vortex in a soda bottle, they will get a first-hand look at tornadoes.

Through this activity, Bernoulli's principle as it relates to winged flight is demonstrated. Student pairs use computers and an online virtual wind tunnel to see the influence of camber and airfoil angle of attack on lift. Activity and math worksheets are provided.

Students gain a basic understanding of electrical circuits. They build wire circuits and pass paperclips through the mazes, trying not to touch the wires. Touching a wire with a paperclip causes the circuit to close, which activates an indicator.

On YouTube: Time lapse video of Wisconsin Fast Plants growing from planted seed through flowering to seed production, set to music!Time lapse just makes them grow a little faster than they do in real life -- this video shows approximately 40 days, the time it takes to produce the next generation.

Students will examine graphs on education, earnings, and workforce participation for men and women between 1940 and 2010. Specifically, students will study a graph of the percentages of managers who were women from 1940 to 2009 to understand the connection between the increase in these percentages and the feminist movement of the 1960s.

A town board based classroom scenario where students decide what to do with a parcel of land on the shoreline of a lake. Various interested parties try to purchase, but must answer town board questions in the process. Real issues of land-use, resource allocation, ethics, planning, and impacts.

The purpose of this task is to assess (1) ability to distinguish between an observational study and an experiment and (2) understanding of the role of raandom assingment to experimental groups in an experiment.

This problem allows students to see words that can describe the expression. Additionally , the words (add, sum) and (product, multiply) are all strategically used so that the student can see that these words have related meanings.

Investigating a waterwheel illustrates to students the physical properties of energy. They learn that the concept of work, force acting over a distance, differs from power, which is defined as force acting over a distance over some period of time. Students create a model waterwheel and use it to calculate the amount of power produced and work done.

Badges are a great way to signal that a journal values transparent research practices. Readers see the papers that have underlying data or methods available, colleagues see that norms are changing within a community and have ample opportunities to emulate better practices, and authors get recognition for taking a step into new techniques. In this webinar, Professor Stephen Lindsay of University of Victoria discusses the workflow of a badging program, eligibility for badge issuance, and the pitfalls to avoid in launching a badging program. Visit cos.io/badges to learn more.

This series of questions before instruction, in-class peer instruction, and post-instruction allow students to iterate and improve their understanding of work incrementally.

This activity is a lab intended to help students learn to setup an investigation with worms to learn about experimental design and data collection.

Students learn how motion capture (mo-cap) technology enables computer animators to create realistic effects. They learn the importance of center of gravity in animation and how to use the concept of center of gravity in writing an action scene. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world — concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.

In this activity, students create a book, newspaper or other published work to communicate what they have learned about engineering and the environment.

The purpose of this task is to help students understand and articulate the reasons for the steps in the usual algorithm for converting a mixed number into an equivalent fraction.

The purpose of this task is to give students practice writing a constraint equation for a given context. Instruction accompanying this task should introduce the notion of a constraint equation as an equation governing the possible values of the variables in question.

The instructions for the two expressions sound very similar, however, the order in which the different operations are performed and the exact wording make a big difference in the final expression. Students have to pay close attention to the wording: Ňsubtract the result from 1Ó and Ňsubtract 1 from the resultÓ are very different.

This activity is a creative writing assignment in which first graders create poetry from scientific information about dragonflies.

You can create your own lectures, homework, and labs around any PhET simulation by using the PhET Activity Guidelines. These guidelines will help you create "guided inquiry activities which encourage students to construct their own understanding," which are the most effective way to use PhET simulations.

Writing a Wikipedia article about a genetic disease is a good culminating activity for a genetics course or module, as it requires synthesizing and interpreting a wide range of genetic information. This assignment also includes a potential service component, which is normally very difficult in genetics.