This lesson plan provides instructions for several activities for students to perform to study the relationship of temperature, pressure, relative humidity, and dew point in cloud formation. The lesson involves graphing of weather balloon data using a spreadsheet program. Full description.

This lesson plan uses NASA satellite data to correlate cloud cover over Africa to the solar declination. The four seasons on Earth have a scientific basis. The Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees from vertical. This tilt and the Earth's orbit around the sun are the reasons for the seasons. Earth's tilt and orbital position cause differing angles at which the sun's rays hit the surface of the Earth. As Earth ... Full description.

This lesson plan uses NASA satellite data to contrast amounts of cloud coverage over different climate regions in Africa. It introduces the circulation pattern of Hadley Cells and the band of convergence and convection called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The lesson also discusses how frequent cloud cover and precipitation occur along the ITCZ and how climate affects the people living ... Full description.

This website, developed to support the GLOBE Contrail Protocol, contains the latest information pertaining to contrails, including the history and science of contrails, and their importance to society. It also contains examples of imagery available from satellites in a contrail gallery. It provides learning resources for teachers like the crossword puzzle, word search and contrail ID chart. Lastly ... Full description.

This tutorial provides detailed information about how clouds receive their names and the importance of root words. It was designed to help students make accurate observations for the Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) project. Students will also learn to associate different clouds into height groupings. Information is provided about the cloud types and on how to distinguish similar clouds ... Full description.

This astronomy program is designed for middle school children in out-of-school-time settings. The program explores basic astronomy concepts (like invisible light, telescopes) and focuses on the universe outside the solar system (stars, galaxies, black holes). By offering programming on these topics outside of the classroom, where schedules are less constrained, Afterschool Universe engages students ... Full description.

This flyer is a two-page overview of the Student Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) education project. It covers the project's educational contributions, societal benefits, educational outgrowths, and scientific findings. The flyer shows the numbers and locations of S'COOL participation and regional observation coverage. It also contains URLs for online resources (e.g., GLOBE contrail education and ... Full description.

This webpage, developed by William Beaty at the University of Washington, provides long list of common scientific misconceptions organized by topic. Topic include work and power, space, sound, measurement, properties of matter, magnets and magnetism, lithosphere, light, heat and temperature, forces, fluids, motion, energy, electricity, color and vision, biosphere, atmosphere and astronomy. Full description.

This is an abstract for a paper that reports on a general strategy for making the learning environment in large (and small) lectures more effective by increasing student involvement. Researchers have used and evaluated the effectiveness of Microcomputer-Based Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs) in introductory physics lectures since 1989 and have found them to be very successful for teaching ... Full description.

This site provides a summary of an on-going ecological biocomplexity research project that began in the mid-1970's. Coined the "Portal Project," because of its location near the southeastern Arizona town of Portal, research has been conducted on 24 plots for over 20 years. This research primarily focuses on the interactions of ants, rodents, and desert plant species. The summary provided on this website ... Full description.