In Headlines and High Water, players take on the role of a young journalist in the fictional town of Twin Lakes, where the annual Cherry Festival is thrown into chaos by a catastrophic flood. The player is tasked with interviewing locals and writing stories to keep the town informed—all while staying safe during the town’s worst flood of the century.

Throughout the game, players build trust with the townspeople and interview a cast of quirky characters—like Birdie, the aptly-named nature conservationist, and Fred Finkler, the gardener who’ll talk your ear off. In the end, the player’s reporting will determine if Twin Lakes is still around a year from now, or if future floods wash the town right off the map.

This is a lesson that could also be used as an assessment for students who are learning about the Kingdoms of Life.

This instructional slide show mixes original OpenSciEd instructional content for unit 6.1: Light and Matter with student activities and supplemental instruction.  Please make a copy to modify.  

This guide to OpenSciEd unit 7.5: Ecosystem Dynamics and Biodiversity includes: Lesson pacing; and Assessment guidance. School districts that use The Teacher Clarity Playbook by Fisher and Frey Playbook will benefit from using this guide. Each lesson is labeled by a number and letter (ie: 3a) and contains the original resource three-dimensional standards as Lesson Level Performance Expectations. We have broken those PEs into student-friendly Learning Intentions and Success Criteria, which can be posted on boards or digital slides and used for assessment criteria.  

This curriculum guide contains pacing, instruction, prior knowledge, and assessment guidance to accompany the OpenSciEd unit 7.5 Ecosystem Dynamics and Biodiversity. For schools who use Fisher and Frey's The Teacher Clarity Playbook, you'll find student-friendly learning intentions and success criteria for every lesson (indicated by a number and letter, ie: 4b), drawn from the OSE three dimensional performance expectations. These can be posted on slides or boards in classrooms to make learning visible for students and help design assessment criteria.   

This curriculum guide contains pacing, instruction, and assessment guidance to accompany the OpenSciEd unit 7.6 Earth Resources & Human Impact. For schools who use Fisher and Frey's The Teacher Clarity Playbook, you'll find student-friendly learning intentions and success criteria for every lesson, drawn from the OSE three dimensional performance expectations. These can be posted on slides or boards in classrooms to make learning visible for students and help design assessment criteria.  

This set of slides has been curated and developed by Kim Lemberger at the STEM Innovation Center Einstein Project and a cohort of teachers who trained under Kim. They are intended to elaborated on the labs in the 8.4 unit of OpenSciEd. 

The scenario is that the student is working in the engineering department of a manufacturing plant. The plant has access to a wide variety of machining tools, so it is customary for them to make or repair their own parts as things wear out. Many of the parts are unique to the equipment at the facility, so it is impossible to simply order one from some outside supplier. Even if a part was available, it is cost prohibitive to buy new.

Students will be provided with a small piece of machinery that they must reverse engineer the dimensions. For middle school level students, the geometry will be kept rather simple and the measurements straightforward. For high school students, the geometry can become more complex, requiring some drafting skill, caliper use, and higher level CAD design.

Once the students take all the necessary measurements, then using CAD (Tinkercad for the lower grades), they will build up a virtual mock-up of the part. From there, the option would be to teach additive or reductive design. The part could be recreated using either a CNC or 3D printer.

In this lesson students will learn about food allergies and how food manufacturing companies, like McCain Foods, work hard to properly label foods and protect against cross contamination. Students will analyze data from allergen testing and make recommendations to improve cleaning procedures.

In this lesson, students will learn about the different properties of paper towels and design a method for testing paper towel absorbency and strength.

In this lesson, students develop models for understanding of the paper recycling process and the important role they play in conserving and recycling our natural resources.