Students engage in hands-on, true-to-life research experiences on air quality topics chosen for personal interest through a unit composed of one lesson and five associated activities. Using a project-based learning approach suitable for secondary science classrooms and low-cost air quality monitors, students gain the background and skills needed to conduct their own air quality research projects. The curriculum provides: 1) an introduction to air quality science, 2) data collection practice, 3) data analysis practice, 4) help planning and conducting a research project and 5) guidance in interpreting data and presenting research in professional poster format. The comprehensive curriculum requires no pre-requisite knowledge of air quality science or engineering. This curriculum takes advantage of low-cost, next-generation, open-source air quality monitors called Pods. These monitors were developed in a mechanical engineering lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and are used for academic research as well as education and outreach. The monitors are made available for use with this curriculum through AQ-IQ Kits that may be rented from the university by teachers. Alternatively, nearly the entire unit, including the student-directed projects, could also be completed without an air quality monitor. For example, students can design research projects that utilize existing air quality data instead of collecting their own, which is highly feasible since much data is publically available. In addition, other low-cost monitors could be used instead of the Pods. Also, the curriculum is intentionally flexible, so that the lesson and its activities can be used individually. See the Other section for details about the Pods and ideas for alternative equipment, usage without air quality monitors, and adjustments to individually teach the lesson and activities.

As a class, students use a low-cost air quality monitor (a rentable “Pod”) to measure the emissions from different vehicles. By applying the knowledge about combustion chemistry that they gain during the pre-activity reading (or lecture presentation, alternatively), students predict how the emissions from various vehicles will differ in terms of pollutants (CO2, VOCs and NO2), and explain why. After data collection, students examine the time series plots as a class—a chance to interpret the results and compare them to their predictions. Short online videos and a current event article help to highlight the real-world necessity of understanding and improving vehicle emissions. Numerous student handouts are provided. The activity content may be presented independently of its unit and without using an air quality monitor by analyzing provided sample data.

"These three free digital courses introduce students to what data science is and why it matters. Through interactive exercises, students explore foundational data science knowledge, including collecting, visualizing, and understanding data. Data Science Foundations is the 101-course with two extension opportunities in the form of a Financial Wellness and Banking Fraud simulation."
Includes 3 courses:
*foundations
*financial wellness
*banking fraud

Student teams design and create LEGO® structures to house and protect temperature sensors. They leave their structures in undisturbed locations for a week, and regularly check and chart the temperatures. This activity engages students in the design and analysis aspects of engineering.

Geographic information systems (GIS), once used predominantly by experts in cartography and computer programming, have become pervasive in everyday business and consumer use. This unit explores GIS in general as a technology about which much more can be learned, and it also explores applications of that technology. Students experience GIS technology through the use of Google Earth on the environmental topic of plastics in the ocean in an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The use of this topic in GIS makes the unit multidisciplinary, incorporating the physics of ocean currents, the chemistry associated with pollutant degradation and chemical sorption to organic-rich plastics, and ecological impact to aquatic biota.

Ever wanted to take your students on an exciting journey? What if you could take that journey from the comfort of the classroom or out-of-school learning environment? Welcome to Mission to Mars!

Over the course of these lessons, you and your students will learn about and plan a mission to Mars. Your students will apply their creativity and science and math knowledge to explore the Red Planet. Not a scientist or engineer? That's okay! You're going to learn everything you need to know while preparing for and conducting these lessons. And you actually already have some engineering skills, whether you know it or not.

In this unit, students learn about Mars, design a mission to explore the planet, build and test model spacecraft and components, and engage in scientific exploration. The unit takes students through seven stages, including learning about the planet, planning the mission, designing the spacecraft, launching, landing, surface operations, and sample handling.

In this group task students collect data and investigate whether there is a relationship between height and hand size among the students in the class.

"The best internet safety lessons recognize the complexity of these topics and help students build the critical-thinking skills and habits of mind to navigate the dilemmas they encounter."

This site links in the best lessons for internet safety from Common Sense Media for K-12.

With the assistance of a few teacher demonstrations (online animation, using a radiometer and rubbing hands), students review the concept of heat transfer through convection, conduction and radiation. Then they apply an understanding of these ideas as they use wireless temperature probes to investigate the heating capacity of different materials sand and water under heat lamps (or outside in full sunshine). The experiment models how radiant energy drives convection within the atmosphere and oceans, thus producing winds and weather conditions, while giving students the hands-on opportunity to understand the value of remote-sensing capabilities designed by engineers. Students collect and record temperature data on how fast sand and water heat and cool. Then they create multi-line graphs to display and compare their data, and discuss the need for efficient and reliable engineer-designed tools like wireless sensors in real-world applications.

A realistic mass and spring laboratory. Hang masses from springs and adjust the spring stiffness and damping. You can even slow time. Transport the lab to different planets. A chart shows the kinetic, potential, and thermal energy for each spring.

Marie Hartford's class of 5th grade scientists learn about the importance of water quality and its benefits to wildlife and the environment. Within the narrow confines of pH necessary for their tank of red-legged frogs, students use a combination of pond and tap water to keep the tank healthy, using their collected data to make the decision on the proportion between the two.

In this activity, students explore the importance of adequate sampling strategies when conducting a scientific investigation. They are tasked with determining the average temperature of the Earth, using data sets easily found on the Internet, and determine the kind and size of sample necessary to calculate a representative average. The resource includes a student data sheet and an authentic assessment for the module, where students discuss the establishment of a habitation site on Mars. This is Activity C in module 2, titled "Modeling Hot and Cold Planets," of the resource, Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.

In this group task students collect data and analyze from the class to answer the question "is there an association between whether a student plays a sport and whether he or she plays a musical instrument? "

The following file contains the assets (or resources) to accompany the Sask DLC Grade 9 Mathematics. Please note that this is not the content of the course, but the assets used to support and deliver it. The files are organized in a zipped folder. You can download it and extract the files. Links are also provided to other materials like videos and other suggested resources. 

Vision is the primary sense of many animals and much is known about how vision is processed in the mammalian nervous system. One distinct property of the primary visual cortex is a highly organized pattern of sensitivity to location and orientation of objects in the visual field. But how did we learn this? An important tool is the ability to design experiments to map out the structure and response of a system such as vision. In this activity, students learn about the visual system and then conduct a model experiment to map the visual field response of a Panoptes robot. (In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the "all-seeing" watchman giant with 100 eyes.) A simple activity modification enables a true black box experiment, in which students do not directly observe how the visual system is configured, and must match the input to the output in order to reconstruct the unseen system inside the box.

Students apply concepts of disease transmission to analyze infection data, either provided or created using Bluetooth-enabled Android devices. This data collection may include several cases, such as small static groups (representing historically rural areas), several roaming students (representing world-travelers), or one large, tightly knit group (representing urban populations). To explore the algorithms to a deeper degree, students may also design their own diseases using the App Inventor framework.

Check out these great video/curricular resources for Grade 2. The ROVER videos all indicate the curriculum outcomes that they address.

ROVER (Recommended Online Video Education Resources) is a video streaming service for Saskatchewan teachers and students in the PreK-12 education system. It is managed and maintained by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. ROVER is a video-on-demand service that provides teachers and students with the convenience of immediate access to streamed, educational videos that support curricula.

This site also offers all of the curriculum documents for all grade levels.

If you are unable to access the site, it may be because a Saskatchewan Ministry of Education Blackboard login is required. All students have an Edonline account, so contact your child's school or the Ministry of Education’s Support Desk at 1-866-933-8333 or email at stans@gov.sk.ca for login information. Your child's student number will be required.

Check out these great video/curricular resources for Grade 3. The ROVER videos all indicate the curriculum outcomes that they address.

ROVER (Recommended Online Video Education Resources) is a video streaming service for Saskatchewan teachers and students in the PreK-12 education system. It is managed and maintained by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. ROVER is a video-on-demand service that provides teachers and students with the convenience of immediate access to streamed, educational videos that support curricula.

This site also offers all of the curriculum documents for all grade levels.

If you are unable to access the site, it may be because a Saskatchewan Ministry of Education Blackboard login is required. All students have an Edonline account, so contact your child's school or the Ministry of Education’s Support Desk at 1-866-933-8333 or email at stans@gov.sk.ca for login information. Your child's student number will be required.

Add different salts to water, then watch them dissolve and achieve a dynamic equilibrium with solid precipitate. Compare the number of ions in solution for highly soluble NaCl to other slightly soluble salts. Relate the charges on ions to the number of ions in the formula of a salt. Calculate Ksp values.

These activities introduce students to the use of sampling for advertising purposes. They also generates a discussion about how advertisers use gimmicks to get people to buy more of their product. Even young students will admit that they have been induced to buy fast food meals in order to collect all of the toys.