The purpose of this resource is to determine the latitude, longitdue, and elevation of your school and of all your GLOBE sites. The GPS receiver will be used to determine the latitude, longitude and elevation of your school or of your GLOBE sites. Full description.

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.

The purpose of this resource is to further students' understanding of the causes of seasonal change using visualizations to compare the effects of incoming solar energy in the two hemispheres. The class reviews global visualizations of incoming sunlight and surface temperature and discusses seasonal change. Students use the visualizations to support inquiry on the differences in seasonal change in ... Full description.

Discovering Plate Boundaries is based on 5 world maps containing earthquake, volcano, topography, satellite gravity, and seafloor age data. The novel aspect of the exercise is the "jigsaw" manner in which student groups access the maps and use them to discover, classify, and describe plate boundary types. The exercise is based only on observation and description, which makes it useful at a wide variety ... 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.

In this lesson, students calculate the amount of radiative energy reaching the ground on a clear day, a day with cirrus overcast, and a day with significant cumulus convection. Comparisons will be made to determine how clouds affect the solar radiation received at the surface of Earth. Students will begin to understand the effects of cloud type on radiative energy. They also learn how clouds affect ... Full description.

This activity has students use internet resources to learn about celestial coordinates, and how to use an emphemeris to locate planets on a horizon sky map. The sky maps are then used for outdoor observing. A more advanced application has students draw maps in celestial coordinates. They first learn about the celestial coordinate system astronomers use and then they generate a position, or ephemeris, ... Full description.

In this activity, students measure the circumference of a wheel using four different methods. The first method is similar to the method used by the Greek philosopher, Eratosthenes, who made an excellent estimate of the circumference of the Earth around 330 B.C. by assuming that the Earth is a sphere and that the sun's rays are parallel when they reach the Earth. In a second method, students measure ... 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.

This contrived natural selection simulation has students build and modify simple paper airplanes (Origami Birds). They demonstrate that: mutations occur randomly; selection is based on the immediate needs of the organism; inherited characteristics (whether mutated or not) are contingent; divergent evolution may occur when sub-populations face different environments; convergent evolution may result ... Full description.