Students will examine tables of data from the 1820 Census to understand the implications of the Missouri Compromise, specifically in Maine and Missouri.
The purpose of this activity is to introduce students to the Missouri Compromise and the issues associated with the expansion of slavery in the Antebellum period of United States history. Students will begin the activity by creating a map that represents the Missouri Compromise’s impact on the United States. This map will serve as a backdrop for the activity while introducing students to political and cultural sectionalism (northern and southern states and the issue of slavery) in the early 1800s. After students complete the map, they will answer several questions using it. Students will also be prompted to examine aggregated data from the 1820 Census and a map titled “Mapping Slavery in the Nineteenth Century” to make comparisons and draw conclusions about slavery, specifically in Missouri.
Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how engineers use this technique to determine the environmental impact of everyday products and processes. As they examine what’s involved in making and consuming cupcakes, a snack enjoyed by millions of people every year, students learn about the production, use and disposal phases of an object’s life cycle. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materials, oven baking, frosting, liner disposal—and calculate energy usage and greenhouse gases emitted from making one cupcake. They use ratios and fractions, and compare options for some of the life-cycle stages, such as different paper wrapper endings (disposal to landfills or composting) in order to make a life-cycle plan with a lower environmental impact. This activity opens students’ eyes to see the energy use in the cradle-to-grave lives of everyday products. Pre/post-quizzes, worksheets, activity cards, Excel® workbook and visual aids are provided.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: Understand conditional probability; represent events as a subset of a sample space using tables and tree diagrams; and communicate their reasoning clearly.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students understand conditional probability, and, in particular, to help teachers identify and assist students who have the following difficulties: representing events as a subset of a sample space using tables and tree diagrams; and understanding when conditional probabilities are equal for particular and general situations.
Students use the STELLA program to create hierarchies of models of increasing complexity to understand the absorption of solar energy by the Earth and its radiation of that energy back to space.
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Students use a variety of tools to explore the interior of the Earth in this inquiry activity.
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Students will learn why families are important social institutions and how family structures, household sizes, and living arrangements have changed substantially since the 1970s. In part 1, students will work in groups of three to four to analyze census data so that they may understand these changes. In part 2, students will watch a clip from the show “Modern Family” and compare their observations with census data.
Students learn the physical properties of sound, how it travels and how noise impacts human health—including the quality of student learning. They learn different techniques that engineers use in industry to monitor noise level exposure and then put their knowledge to work by using a smart phone noise meter app to measure the noise level at an area of interest, such as busy roadways near the school. They devise an experimental procedure to measure sound levels in their classroom, at the source of loud noise (such as a busy road or construction site), and in between. Teams collect data using smart phones/tablets, microphones and noise apps. They calculate wave properties, including frequency, wavelength and amplitude. A PowerPoint® presentation, three worksheets and a quiz are provided.
Lecture notes for using Crystal Ball for modelling
This lesson teaches students how to make decisions in the face of uncertainty by using decision trees. It is aimed for high school kids with a minimal background in probability; the students only need to know how to calculate the probability of two uncorrelated events both occurring (ie flipping 2 heads in a row). Over the course of this lesson, students will learn about the role of uncertainty in decision making, how to make and use a decision tree, how to use limiting cases to develop an intuition, and how this applies to everyday life. The video portion is about fifteen minutes, and the whole lesson, including activities, should be completed in about forty-five minutes. Some of the activities call for students to work in pairs, but a larger group is also okay, especially for the discussion centered activities. The required materials for this lesson are envelopes, small prizes, and some things similar in size and shape to the prize.
This task requires students to think about what makes a representative sample.
In this group task students collect data and analyze from the class to answer the question "is there an association between whether a student plays a sport and whether he or she plays a musical instrument? "
Students will analyze and interpret American Community Survey (ACS) data on housing characteristics in the United States, comparing these data with those they collect from their classmates. Students also will determine what their dream home would look like and will use flat, two-dimensional shapes to construct it.
Students pick a place of significance to them (their Special Place) for analysis in this semester-long project. (A model is provided by the instructor using a place the students are not likely to have visited.)
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Solving Mystery in Alaska and investigating the role of science in July 2000 Alaska fishing ban with the intention to protect Steller sea lions.
This activity serves as an introduction to a narrative writing assignment. To provide context for this activity, teachers will give students an overview of the Census Bureau. Then, students will complete a Quickwrite about their name and its history. After that, students will examine and answer questions about census data on popular last names, listen to a story about names, and complete a Quickwrite about that story. To further prepare for their narrative writing assignment about names (which is not part of this activity), students will jot down their thoughts in a graphic organizer.
Access and explore large datasets from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2003). Working with large datasets that emphasize exploration, finding patterns, and modeling is an essential first step in becoming fluent with data. This activity is a great place for students to start, since the dataset is straightforward and students can decide on the data they want to explore, including height, age, weight, and many other health-related attributes. Students begin by selecting and then investigating subsets of the dataset, for example, to find the cholesterol level of U.S. citizens. Then, working with their classmates or individually, students can try their own data science challenges, such as finding health trends in a subset of Americans by their household income, age, or marital status, etc.
In this activity, students will look at historical images to learn about three types of Native American dwellings — teepees, pueblo adobe structures, and hogans. Students will make observations about the types of dwellings in the images. Then students will discuss their observations as a class.
Students will explore distributions of various census data sets to determine whether it can be reasonably assumed that those data follow a normal distribution, based on students’ analysis of either a histogram or a normal probability plot for each data set. They will then discuss their findings with a partner who analyzed the other type of graph for each data set.