This curriculum was designed for high school students with no prior coding …
This curriculum was designed for high school students with no prior coding experience who are interested in learning Python programming for data science. However, this course material would be useful for anyone interested in teaching or learning basic programming for data analysis.
The curriculum features short lessons to deliver course material in “bite sized” chunks, followed by practices to solidify the learners' understanding. Pre-recorded videos of lessons enable effective virtual learning and flipped classroom approaches.
The learning objectives of this curriculum are:
1. Write code in Python with correct syntax and following best practices. 2. Implement fundamental programming concepts when presented with a programmatic problem set. 3. Apply data analysis to real world data to answer scientific questions. 4. Create informative summary statistics and data visualizations in Python. 5. These skills provide a solid foundation for basic data analysis in Python. Participation in our program exposes students to the many ways coding and data science can be impactful across many disciplines.
Our curriculum design consists of 27 lessons broken up into 5 modules that cover Jupyter notebook setup, Python coding fundamentals, use of essential data science packages including pandas and numpy, basic statistical analyses, and plotting using seaborn and matplotlib. Each lesson consists of a lesson notebook, used for teaching the concept via live coding, and a practice notebook containing similar exercises for the student to complete on their own following the lesson. Each lesson builds on those before it, beginning with relevant content reminders from the previous lessons and ending with a concise summary of the skills presented within.
Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum/Geology of National Parks Collection. Students create a histogram …
Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum/Geology of National Parks Collection. Students create a histogram to examine the time between geyser eruptions of Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park.
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An assignment teaching students about Kohler curves that enhances their quantitative skills. …
An assignment teaching students about Kohler curves that enhances their quantitative skills.
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The purpose of this exercise is to integrate modeling with field data. …
The purpose of this exercise is to integrate modeling with field data. The activity includes links to a "virtual field trip" of maps and photographs. Data from a creek is included in the field trip and students use an Excel spreadsheet model to analyze the data.
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Using data on the world's water distribution, students calculate the percentage of …
Using data on the world's water distribution, students calculate the percentage of water that is available to humans and examine graphics that illustrate the distribution. Students develop a sense of where the world's water is located and how it moves through the Earth system.
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In Part A of this activity, students will learn about how sea …
In Part A of this activity, students will learn about how sea ice forms and influences ocean currents around the globe. In Part B, they will look at how sea ice thickness changes over time. Finally, in Part C, students will use NSIDC sea ice index data to explore changes in sea ice extent on multiple time scales including months, years, and decades.
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When populations live in areas where natural resources are scarce, conserving them …
When populations live in areas where natural resources are scarce, conserving them becomes critical for survival. The case study presented in this lesson introduces students to a real drought that has been developing in the Colorado River basin for many years. The Colorado River is the major source of water for people in the driest part of the United States. More than 30 million people in 7 states depend on this river as the primary source of their water. In this lesson, students discover how changes in climate over the Colorado watershed are reducing the amount of fresh water available in the river. They also see how the population of the region that uses this water has grown, resulting in increasing demands on a dwindling resource.
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In this physical geography lab, students examine the relationship between solar altitude, …
In this physical geography lab, students examine the relationship between solar altitude, solar declination, and temperature regimes. Using data collected in the field, mathematical relationships, and temperature records available on the Internet, students compare the insolation and climate in their location to that of other locations.
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This activity utilizes a sandbox analog model which is used to create …
This activity utilizes a sandbox analog model which is used to create normal faults and a foreland propagating fold and thrust belt. For the normal fault portion of the activity, students investigate the progression of normal fault generation and accumulation of offset. During the thrust fault portion of the activity, students evaluate (1) the initiation angles of thrust faults, (2) compare that to the final angles to understand how fault angles rotate with progressive thrust propagation, and (3) they visualize how the critical slope angle is involved in the initiation of younger thrust faults. In addition, they conceptualize methods utilized to evaluate the magnitude of fault offset, and vertical and horizontal shortening. This activity is motivated by and utilizes a sandbox model from: Dell Castello, M., and Cooke, M., 2008, Watch faults grow before your very eyes in a deformational sandbox: Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 56, p. 324-333. Tips for the activity: I place a sheet of sandpaper under the sand on one side of the compression experiment to test the outcomes with varying basal friction. For the extension portion, I attach separate metal sheets to the stationary wall and the moving wall, under the sand. These sheets are joined by elastic fabric. To save money, mix non-toxic paint powder into basic sand to get colored sand.
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A short laboratory exercise, conducted by students, is used to illustrate the …
A short laboratory exercise, conducted by students, is used to illustrate the multiple factors that contribute to rocks' varied responses to deformation. Analogue materials (play-doh, notebook springs, butter, silly putty, plastic bags, etc.) are used to illustrate many of the controlling factors such as lithology, stress, temperature, confining pressure, strain rate, preexisting weaknesses, and accumulated strain. The analogue experiments are presented in conjunction with parallel data from deformation experiments and field studies. The tandem presentation of analogue experiment and real data requires the students to obtain a natural "feel" for rheologic parameters and more exhaustively analyze the important conclusions obtained from field and deformation experiment data.
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Students use the modeling program STELLA to see what combinations of runoff …
Students use the modeling program STELLA to see what combinations of runoff and evaporation might have lead to Pleistocene lake level oscillations in California's Owens River system.
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Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have …
Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Mixing disrupts these gradients by redistributing these materials throughout the water column. Consequently, it is critical to understand the drivers of lake mixing and thermal stratification, especially because of the sensitivity of lake thermal conditions to altered climate. In this module, students will explore spatial and temporal patterns of lake mixing using high-frequency temperature data from lakes around the world. They will also explore how increases in air temperature affect thermal stratification by interpreting output from a lake model. Project EDDIE modules are designed with an A-B-C structure to make them flexible and adaptable to a range of student levels and course structures.
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Students create a STELLA model of two marine terrace platforms separated in …
Students create a STELLA model of two marine terrace platforms separated in elevation by a cliff, using the hillslope flux equation to simulate the change in the cliff face over time as diffusive processes tear it down.
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Unit composed of 3 exercises designed to expose students to the physical …
Unit composed of 3 exercises designed to expose students to the physical processes that lead to landslides and how scientists model these processes.
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This activity provides young students with a relevant model (a layer cake) …
This activity provides young students with a relevant model (a layer cake) to help them understand concepts about sedimentary rock layers (such as the Law of Superposition), correlation of the rock record with geologic time and relative ages of rocks and fossils.
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Students will analyze and compare census data on the earnings of people …
Students will analyze and compare census data on the earnings of people with different college majors. Then they will write their own word problems and draw conclusions about the data.
This is a set of five exercises that teach the basic skills …
This is a set of five exercises that teach the basic skills of using Perplex and the possible types of understanding one can gain from the use of internally-consistent thermodynamic databases. The exercises culminate in the creation of a pseudosection for a particular rock.
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Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students use a …
Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students use a topographic map and spreadsheet to find how many Big Macs they burned off on a five-mile hike at Catoctin Mountain Park.
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Students learn about the weighted mean by building spreadsheets that apply this …
Students learn about the weighted mean by building spreadsheets that apply this concept to the average density of the oceanic lithosphere.
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