The purpose of this resource is to understand what causes the Earth's seasons with a focus on the Earth's tilt and spherical shape. Students learn how sunlight spreads over the Earth at different times of the year, emphasizing the solstices and the equinoxes. Students investigate the effect of the Earth.s tilt on the spread of sunlight by modeling different tilts using a three-dimensional polyhedron ... Full description.

This lesson is based on an article that explains what cladistics is, why it is useful, how it is applied, and what its limitations are. Students will learn that biological classification is intimately associated with evolution; that there are many problems encountered in classification, which is evidence that the living world is a work in progress, and evolution provides an explanation for those problems. ... Full description.

This lesson on natural selection shows students that population characteristics can change as a result of selective pressures operating over several generations. In the lesson, groups of students go hunting for beans in the lawn. Each group has a different tool (e.g. hand, spoon, fork, etc). There are three different colors of beans. The hunting goes for three rounds (generations), with extinctions ... Full description.

These are the teaching notes for a case study in which students use cooperative learning and role-playing to explore the scientific, technical, environmental, and ethical issues related to the possibility of cloning dinosaurs from ancient DNA. The case was designed to enhance the learning environment in an introductory class through cooperative problem-solving and to promote active participation in ... Full description.

In this activity, students will explore how energy is distributed at the surface of the earth in both space and time. Using data sets collected from Black Rock Forest, an instrumented education and research forest near West Point, New York, they will investigate variations in hourly solar energy influx and daily average solar radiation. They will make observations from the data, interpret it, and ... Full description.

This activity introduces students to the basic laws of radiation that apply to the sun-Earth-atmosphere system, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and Wien's Displacement Law. In the first part of the activity , they will use these laws to calculate the average irradiance of the sun and its total emitted power, as well as the wavelength of peak emission of sunlight and the earth's irradiance at a ground temperatue ... Full description.

This lesson introduces students to the building of cladograms as evolutionary trees showing how "shared derived characters" can be used to reveal degrees of relationship. Given some groups of organisms and some of their distinguishing characteristics, the students will construct a cladogram. Given a cladogram, the students will properly interpret and analyze that cladogram in terms of recognizing ... Full description.

This lesson is based on an essay by Stephen Jay Gould and on the related reading guide. It addresses the issue of cladistics and some of the problems encountered in the science of Systematics. Students will learn that biological classification is intimately associated with evolution. They will also learn that there are many problems encountered in classification, providing evidence that the living ... Full description.

In this lesson students learn how classification of organisms is based on evolutionary relationships. They will also learn how primates are categorized, and how they are related. Students transfer examples (names) of primates from their location in an outline hierarchy of primate groups into a set of nested boxes reflecting that same hierarchy. A cladogram can then be drawn illustrating how these ... Full description.

This resource allows students to make use of data generated by environmental sensors that are distributed throughout Black Rock Forest. It includes interactive activities to acquaint the student with remote sensing and with the data-gathering tools. The data are used in various activities that strengthen the students' understanding of the earth system. Full description.