Historically, seafloor mapping occurred with a simple data collection method: soundings. Soundings are taken by dropping a weight with a pre-measured rope off the side of a boat and noting the measurement on the rope when the weight hits the bottom. In this activity, student teams replicate the creation of seafloor bathymetry by taking a simplified form of soundings of an unseen seafloor model inside a shoebox and translating their collected data into a visualization of the topography, enabling them to better understand and appreciate modern remote sensing.

Students are introduced to the concept of tracking and spatial movements of animals in relation to the environments in which they live. Students improve their understanding of animal tracking and how technology is used in this process.

The marine environment is unique and because little light penetrates under water, technologies that use sound are required to gather information. The seafloor is characterized using underwater sound and acoustical systems. Current technological innovations enable scientists to further understand and apply information about animal locations and habitat. Remote sensing and exploration with underwater vehicles enables researchers to map and understand the sea floor. Similar technologies also aid in animal tracking, a method used within science and commercial industries. Through inquiry-based learning techniques, students learn the importance of habitat mapping and animal tracking.

Students explore the relationships between genetics, biodiversity, and evolution through a simple activity involving hypothetical wild mouse populations. First, students toss coins to determine what traits a set of mouse parents possesses, such as fur color, body size, heat tolerance, and running speed. Next they use coin tossing to determine the traits a mouse pup born to these parents possesses. These physical features are then compared to features that would be most adaptive in several different environmental conditions. Finally, students consider what would happen to the mouse offspring if those environmental conditions were to change: which mice would be most likely to survive and produce the next generation?

Mechanical energy is the most easily understood form of energy for students. When there is mechanical energy involved, something moves. Mechanical energy is a very important concept to understand. Engineers need to know what happens when something heavy falls from a long distance changing its potential energy into kinetic energy. Automotive engineers need to know what happens when cars crash into each other, and why they can do so much damage, even at low speeds! Our knowledge of mechanical energy is used to help design things like bridges, engines, cars, tools, parachutes, and even buildings! In this lesson, students will learn how the conservation of energy applies to impact situations such as a car crash or a falling object.

For students that have already been introduced to the water cycle this lesson is intended as a logical follow-up. Students will learn about human impacts on the water cycle that create a pathway for pollutants beginning with urban development and joining the natural water cycle as surface runoff. The extent of surface runoff in an area depends on the permeability of the materials in the ground. Permeability is the degree to which water or other liquids are able to flow through a material. Different substances such as soil, gravel, sand, and asphalt have varying levels of permeability. In this lesson, along with the associated activities, students will learn about permeability and compare the permeability of several different materials for the purpose of engineering landscape drainage systems.

Student groups are challenged to create food packages for specific foods. They focus on three components in the design of their food packages; the packages must keep the food clean, protect or aid in the physical and chemical changes that can take place in the food, and present the food appealingly. They design their packaging to meet these requirements.

Students explore the physics utilized by engineers in designing today's roller coasters, including potential and kinetic energy, friction, and gravity. First, students learn that all true roller coasters are completely driven by the force of gravity and that the conversion between potential and kinetic energy is essential to all roller coasters. Second, they also consider the role of friction in slowing down cars in roller coasters. Finally, they examine the acceleration of roller coaster cars as they travel around the track. During the associated activity, the students design, build, and analyze a roller coaster for marbles out of foam tubing.

This lesson is the second of two that explore cellular respiration and population growth in yeasts. In the first lesson, students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Based on questions that arose during the first lesson and its associated activity, in this lesson students work in small groups to design experiments that will determine how environmental factors affect yeast population growth.

After learning about the concept of transfer of energy, specifically the loss of kinetic energy to friction, students get a chance to test friction. Student groups are each given a wooden block and different fabrics and weights and challenged to design the "best" puck. First the class defines what makes the "best" puck. They come to realize that the most desirable puck is the one that travels the farthest, thus the puck with the least amount of friction. In the context of hockey, the "best" puck is the one that travels farthest and loses the least kinetic energy to friction. Students then apply their knowledge of friction the energy transfer from kinetic to heat energy to design new, optimal pucks for the National Hockey League.

Students use a spring scale to drag an object such as a ceramic coffee cup along a table top or the floor. The spring scale allows them to measure the frictional force that exists between the moving cup and the surface it slides on. By modifying the bottom surface of the cup, students find out what kinds of surfaces generate more or less friction.

Echolocation is the ability to orient by transmitting sound and receiving echoes from objects in the environment. As a result of a Marco-Polo type activity and subsequent lesson, students learn basic concepts of echolocation. They use these concepts to understand how dolphins use echolocation to locate prey, escape predators, navigate their environment, such as avoiding gillnets set by commercial fishing vessels. Students will also learn that dolphin sounds are vibrations created by vocal organs, and that sound is a type of wave or signal that carries energy and information especially in the dolphin's case. Students will learn that a dolphin's sense of hearing is highly enhanced and better than that of human hearing. Students will also be introduced to the concept of by-catch Students will learn what happens to animals caught through by-catch and why.

Music can loosely be defined as organized sound. The lesson objectives, understanding sound is a form of energy, understanding pitch, understanding sound traveling through a medium, and being able to separate music from sound, can provide a good knowledge base as to how sound, math, and music are related. Sound exists everywhere in the world; typically objects cause waves of pressure in the air which are perceived by people as sound. Among the sounds that exist in everyday life, a few of them produce a definite pitch. For example, blowing air over half full glass bottles, tapping a glass with a spoon, and tapping long steel rods against a hard surface all produce a definite pitch because a certain component of the object vibrates in a periodic fashion. The pitch produced by an object can be changed by the length or the volume of the portion that vibrates. For example, by gradually filling a bottle while blowing across the top, higher pitches can be generated. By organizing a few of these sounds with a clearer pitch, the sounds become closer to music. The very first musical instruments involved using various objects (e.g. bells) that have different pitches, which are played in sequence. The organization of the pitches is what transforms sounds into music. Since the first instruments, the ability to control pitch has greatly improved as illustrated by more modern instruments such as guitars, violins, pianos, and more. Music is comprised of organized sound, which is made of specific frequencies. This lesson will help define and elaborate on the connections between sound and music.

Music and sound are two different concepts that share much in common. Determining the difference between the two can sometimes be difficult due to the subjective nature of deciding what is or is not music. The goal of this activity is to take something constructed by students, that would be normally classified as just sound and have the class work together to make what can be perceived to be music. Students construct basic stringed instruments made of shoeboxes and rubber bands. This activity aims to increase student understanding of what distinguishes music from sound.

Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of the attempts, students hold their noses and close their eyes, while for others they only close their eyes. After they have conducted the experiment, they create bar graphs showing the number of correct and incorrect identifications for the two different experimental conditions tested.

Students simulate the spread of a virus such as HIV through a population by "sharing" (but not drinking) the water in a plastic cup with several classmates. Although invisible, the water in a few of the cups has already be tainted with the "virus" (sodium carbonate). After all the students have shared their liquids, the contents of the cups are tested for the virus with phenolphthalein, a chemical that causes a striking color change in the presence of sodium carbonate. Students then set about trying to determine which of their classmates were the ones originally infected with the virus.

Students learn how viruses invade host cells and hijack the hosts' cell-reproduction mechanisms in order to make new viruses, which can in turn attack additional host cells. Students also learn how the immune system responds to a viral invasion, eventually defeating the viruses -- if all goes well. Finally, they consider the special case of HIV, in which the virus' host cell is a key component of the immune system itself, severely crippling it and ultimately leading to AIDS. The associated activity, Tracking a Virus, sets the stage for this lesson with a dramatic simulation that allows students to see for themselves how quickly a virus can spread through a population, and then challenges students to determine who the initial bearers of the virus were.

Students conduct a simple test to determine how many drops of each of three liquids water, rubbing alcohol, vegetable oil can be placed on a penny before spilling over. Because of their different surface tensions, more water can be piled on top of a penny than either of the other two liquids. However, the main point of the activity is for students to come up with an explanation for their observations about the different amounts of liquids a penny can hold. To do this, they create hypotheses that explain their observations, and because middle school students are not likely to have prior knowledge of the property of surface tension, their hypotheses are not likely to include this idea. Then they are asked to come up with ways to test their hypotheses, although they do not need to actually conduct these tests as part of this activity.

Students are presented with information that will allow them to recognize that yeasts are unicellular organisms that are useful to humans. In fact, their usefulness is derived from the contrast between the way yeast cells and human cells respire. Specifically, while animal cells derive energy from the combination of oxygen and glucose and produce water and carbon dioxide as by-products, yeasts respire without oxygen. Instead, yeasts break glucose down and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide as their by-products. The lesson is also intended to provoke questions from students about the effects of alcohol on the human body, to which the teacher can provide objective answers.

Students use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine their designs so that their boats will carry as great a load (metal washers) as possible. Building a clay boat to hold as much weight as possible is an engineering design problem. Next, they compare amount of water displaced by a lump of clay that sinks to the amount of water displaced by the same lump of clay when it is shaped so as to float. Determining the masses of the displaced water allows them to arrive at Archimedes' principle, whereby the mass of the displaced water equals the mass of the floating clay boat.