This resource is part of the Science Education Gateway (SEGway) project, funded by NASA, which is a national consortium of scientists, museums, and educators working together to bring the latest science to students, teachers, and the general public. In this module, students investigate the weather similarities and differences between Earth and Mars. Eight investigations allow students to use the internet ... Full description.

This lesson probes a discrepant event to help students become familiar with the process of science. A plastic bottle with three holes covered with tape is filled with water and capped. Students predict what may happen as the tape is removed from each hole in turn, and hypothesize about the cause of the observed results. Full description.

This lesson uses a discrepant event to pique curiosity and provide an excellent metaphor for a problem in science that can be addressed in a scientific way. Water is poured into a magic box, and out comes a much larger volume of water (or other liquid). Students will learn that science is uncertain because scientists can make more than one workable model to explain their observations. Full description.

This lesson teaches students that scientific knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. Students manipulate sealed mystery boxes and attempt to determine the inner structure of the boxes which contain a moving ball and a fixed barrier or two. The nature and sources of uncertainty inherent in the process of problem-solving are experienced. The uncertainty of the conclusions is reduced by student collaboration. ... Full description.

This lesson teaches students that interpretations of scientific data may be limited by the completeness of the data. The lesson is built around the poem by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887): The Blind Men and the Elephant. Through small group activity and class discussions, the limiting influence of incomplete data and bias, along with the value of collaboration, are experienced. Full description.

This lesson is designed to help students recognize and deal with bias which may be found in scientific studies. Students will discover that because human values deeply influence terminology, the questions asked, and the criteria for choosing among theories, science incorporates procedures intended to eliminate (or at least reduce) the influence of natural biases we all have. One of these is the requirement ... Full description.

This earth history timeline activity relates events in the geologic past to distances measured on a piece of adding machine tape. Further activities are used to help the students visualize the sequence and spacing of the events. The site also contains numerous and varied links that will aid both the teacher and students in performing this activity. These links lead to detailed information on the stratigraphy, ... Full description.

This activity allows students to explore the accuracy of weather folklore and design an experiment that puts it to the test. Students learn that people observed the natural world and looked for patterns to help explain and predict weather and that many of these observations were turned into sayings and passed down through generations. Students collect sayings from family and friends and a class list ... Full description.

In this activity students observe what happens when various amounts of water are poured into a black box and propose models to explain their observations. When water is poured into the funnel, students observe that sometimes water emerges through the outlet tube and sometimes it does not. Also, the amount of water that does emerge is not constant. Students share their initial ideas with others and ... Full description.

This site describes the use of the tools needed to collect samples to create the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth at the American Museum of Natural History. The twenty-four tools covered range from hands and feet to dynamite. Geologists use all kinds of tools on field expeditions, ranging from huge trucks to tiny hand lenses. Some tools, such as maps and rock hammers, are used on all field expeditions. ... Full description.