Category: Author: Cynthia McIntyre
The cover article of the August issue of The Science Teacher features an intriguing shiver of sharks, data about those sharks and other marine animals, plus the perfect way to get your feet wet with data analysis: Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) and Ocean Tracks. Bill Finzer, one of the authors of the Science […]
Four students head to the local park to play cards or Bananagrams on their lunch break. For the rest of the day, they sit quietly around a circular table in our Concord, Massachusetts, office, their computers practically touching around the tight space. Some with ear buds in, they are all focused intently on their screens, […]
When you’re looking up at the solar eclipse on August 21 (wearing appropriate eye protection, of course), you might also be wondering: What else is out there? Black holes, dark energy, life forms? Are we really alone in the universe? This is one of the great unanswered questions for scientists, which is why it’s in […]
In his spare time, Saul Amster likes to program. He’s currently working on a project to turn a tablet into a magic mirror. Yes, like Snow White’s evil stepmother (“Mirror, mirror on the wall…”), except imagine asking the mirror for the day’s forecast or the score of last night’s game. “Programming is an interesting hobby,” […]
Before interning with senior scientist Charles Xie this summer, Maya Haigis had no idea how many solar panel manufacturers there are—“There’s a ton!” A data science major at the University of Rochester, Maya put her analytic skills to work at the Concord Consortium collecting data on solar panels (dimensions, weight, maximum wattage, etc.) and designed […]
In June, Professor Silvia Wen-Yu Lee and her team at the National Changhua University of Education in Central Taiwan offered a 10-hour modeling curriculum to approximately 100 seventh grade students. Students used a new Chinese language version of SageModeler to model the relationship between marine biology and human activity in a unit about environmental conservation. […]
Breeding virtual dragons is all in a day’s work in biology classrooms using Geniverse, our free, web-based genetics software. Although Geniverse is a game-like environment, it’s far more than child’s play. Indeed, students dive into genetics on a quest to heal a beloved dragon. Students use a model species (drakes) to explore the fundamental mechanisms […]
Did you know that while dragons and their model species drakes are fictional and fanciful, the genetics of these virtual Geniverse creatures is based firmly on the real-world genetics of model organisms? The drake genes and traits have been carefully compiled from the actual genes and associated traits of the anole lizard, mouse, fruit fly, […]
We are delighted to highlight the work of Erin Cothran from Hudson (Massachusetts) High School, for National Teacher Appreciation Day! Erin is teaching a 10th grade chemistry unit she developed based on the driving question, “How can something that can’t be seen crush a 67,000 lb. oil tanker made of half-inch steel?” The unit includes […]
A new collaborative research project at the Concord Consortium and Michigan State University will develop and research learning materials on the molecular and cellular basis for genetics and the process of evolution by natural selection. These two areas are both difficult to teach and learn, and although they have been historically taught separately, they are […]