NCED - Activities

Students will gain a greater understanding of the different positions associated with dam removal by debating the issue from different perspectives. This activity includes assessments, a PowerPoint presentation and a 3-D map of the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Students work in small groups to test an isolated variable affecting the size and shape of rivers. Students form an hypothesis and test the effects of amount of water, water velocity, or steepness of the river bed as it relates to river width, river depth, and delta size. They will then compare their results with other groups who tested the same variable, before presenting their information to the class.

The students will examine watersheds by looking at maps and finding tributaries and other drainage features. The area of land that these tributaries drain is called a watershed. This activity is designed to be used as a supplement to related material. Students will be working in small groups to define watersheds on maps and brainstorm their importance. Download the Elwha River Basin for this activity or use your own maps.

The sediment flask activity is a good introduction to the question how sediment travels in water. This is an instructor facilitated guided inquiry activity that poses questions and asks the students to make predictions of what they think will happen. There is a worksheet for the students to follow as they look at the different variables related to sediment transport in water. The students will then use a sediment flask as a model for what happens in a real river and be able to assess whether their predictions were accurate.

The Jurassic Tank delta activity will allow the students to observe a model of a river delta in formation. Although the footage is from an experimental lab it very closely resembles the actual formation, but because of its compressed time frame the student will student will see millions of years of formation in just a few minutes. This activity is designed to supplement a unit on erosion, sediment, delta formation, river processes or models.

This activity is designed to give students a focused, structured learning experience in the Big Back Yard at the Science Museum of Minnesota. It is possible to breeze through the Big Back Yard, but there was considerable effort put into making it a learning experience for the visitors. This activity is focused on a few of the mini-golf holes and some of the exhibits that are focused on the NCED related theme of source-to-sink.

As a class the students will brainstorm ways the natural world may interact with humans and vice-versa. The students will come up with a list of necessary features of a city or town and will then make decisions where to set up the infrastructure and other features of a city or town. The primary focus of the activity is the interaction between humans and their surroundings and how to best plan for potential problems that may arise. After the students have created a city on the map downloads the class will combine their maps with all the other groups to form a much larger invented community and examine the impacts to those down stream. The emphasis is trying to plan a city using scientific understanding that takes into account the natural/unnatural land processes.

These maps are altered grayscale maps along the same river. All the maps fit together to form one river.

(If you have difficulty getting the whole image for each map to print--they are jpgs--try right clicking on each link to save the map to your own computer and then print it from there or paste into a word processing program.)

Pre-service and in-service teachers join NCED research teams to work on specific research projects. Educators become integral members of the research teams, participating at the level of an undergraduate intern. Teams of pre-service and in-service teachers and NCED graduate students create classroom-ready activities which are tested in the classrooms of the participating educators and other local schools. The activities are evaluated and collected, then broadly disseminated through NCED and Science Museum of Minnesota school outreach programs.