Space Place: How Astronomers "Detwinkle" the Stars

This classroom activity provides an explanation and kinesthetic activity to demonstrate how Earth's atmosphere distorts starlight and how advanced telescope technology (adaptive optics) is used to compensate for this distortion. Educational levels: Intermediate elementary, Middle school, Informal education, General public

Mars Activities: Teacher Resources and Classroom Activities

This set of classroom activities presents the challenges of operating a planetary rover, how to construct a scale model of the Earth-Moon system, how Martian surface core samples can be identified and what they tell us about Mars. Each activity comes with clearly delineated instructions, associated standards, guides and worksheets, and enhancement materials. Educational levels: High school, Intermediate elementary, Middle school, Primary elementary

Coastal Ecosystem Science: Alien Invasion!

This lesson introduces students to the broad concept of invasive species. Students prepare a written case study on an invasive aquatic species, followed by an oral presentation. They will define, compare, and contrast invasive species, alien species, and native species, describe at least three problems that may be associated with invasive species, and describe at least three invasive species, explain how they came to be invasive, and discuss what can be done about them. The lesson plan provides a list of possible species to choose from, and information about their introduction, impact, and control. Suggestions for extensions are also provided. Educational levels: High school, Middle school, Undergraduate lower division

Lightweight Formal Verification in Classroom Instruction of Reasoning about Functional Code

In college courses dealing with material that requires mathematical rigor, the adoption of a machine-readable representation for formal arguments can be advantageous. Students can focus on a specific collection of constructs that are represented consistently. Examples and counterexamples can be evaluated. Assignments can be assembled and checked with the help of an automated formal reasoning system. However, usability and accessibility do not have a high priority and are not addressed sufficiently well in the design of many existing machine-readable representations and corresponding formal reasoning systems. In earlier work [Lap09], we attempt to address this broad problem by proposing several specific design criteria organized around the notion of a natural context: the sphere of awareness a working human user maintains of the relevant constructs, arguments, experiences, and background materials necessary to accomplish the task at hand. We report on our attempt to evaluate our proposed design criteria by deploying within the classroom a lightweight formal verification system designed according to these criteria. The lightweight formal verification system was used within the instruction of a common application of formal reasoning: proving by induction formal propositions about functional code. We present all of the formal reasoning examples and assignments considered during this deployment, most of which are drawn directly from an introductory text on functional programming. We demonstrate how the design of the system improves the effectiveness and understandability of the examples, and how it aids in the instruction of basic formal reasoning techniques. We make brief remarks about the practical and administrative implications of the system’s design from the perspectives of the student, the instructor, and the grader

Space Place: Mapping the Watery Hills and Dales

This classroom activity explains how the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites work to provide precise location information to positions on the ground, as well as to other satellites whose job is to map the surface of Earth. The activity is specifically tied to NASA's Jason-1 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft in their mission to map ocean topography. In addition to the concepts of distance vs. time and triangulation, the article also introduces Doppler effect. The activity was originally published in Technology Teacher, a magazine published by the International Technology Education Association (ITEA). Educational levels: Middle school

Coral Reef Conservation: A Reef of Your Own

This web-based lesson focuses on the physiological, ecological, and behavioral strategies that contribute to the success of reef-building corals. Students will learn to describe and explain the importance of asexual and sexual reproductive strategies to reef-building corals, why it is important that the corals have a nutritional strategy that includes both photosynthesis and carnivory, two behaviors that they use to compete for living space with other species, and how coral reefs can produce high levels of biological material when the waters surround­ing them contain relatively small amounts of the nutri­ents normally needed to support biological production. Links to the required online resources are provided. Educational levels: High school, Middle school, Undergraduate lower division

Technology Teacher: Singing the Black and Blues

Gives simple, yet authoritative answers to the questions "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why is the sky black at night?" Combines technology with its application to Earth science, astronomy, and cosmology, and does so via language arts and music! This article was originally written for and published by the International Technology Education Association in its journal 'The Technology Teacher.' It is now archived on The Space Place Web site. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

Technology Teacher: Navigating by Good Gyrations

This activity describes some simple, yet impressive gyroscopic demonstrations using only a bike wheel with a quick-release hub. Then, itIt explains both the angular momentum principle that tends to keep the wheel in a rigid plane and the effects of the external forces that create precession. And all without a single equation!No equations are used during the activity. Understanding the forces at work on a gyroscope will raise your students' consciousness of all kinds of devices and phenomena, from how and why a football, a rifle, and a Frisbee disk work to how an aircraft or a spacecraft can keep itself on course. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

Technology Teacher: Listening for Rings from Space

This activity introduces gravitational waves and the NASA technology being developed to detect them in space. It involves building a metaphorical interferometer that demonstrates how the mission (and all interferometry) works. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

The Implementation of Flipped Classroom in Efl Class: a Taiwan Case Study

This article reports on a case study designed to examine the implementation of flipped classroom in the EFL classroom in Taiwan.  In addition, students' perception of flipped classroom was also investigated. Sixty-one senior high school students participated in this study; data were gathered from students' English midterm exam score and questionnaire. The data then were quantitatively analyzed by using T-test and descriptive statistics. The results show that students' English proficiency in flipped classroom was not significantly different with students in traditional classroom. However, the results reveal that students' perception of flipped classroom were generally favorable. Students' contended that flipped classroom enhanced their motivation in learning English, as they liked the self-pace through the course and they stated that flipped classroom gave them more class time to practice English. The results presented here may facilitate improvements in the implementation of flipped classroom in EFL class. Furthermore, suggestions for further research are also presented