Between Feb. 1 and Aug. 31 2010, GEF (Green Education Foundation) is calling on schools and youth groups nationwide to plant 10,000 classroom and outdoor gardens - the largest youth gardening initiative in history! The Green Thumb Challenge aims to connect kids across the country with the joys and healthy benefits of gardening, providing participants with beginner-friendly resources to plant gardens of any size. Whether sowing seeds during one class period, planting bulbs in one afternoon, or planning an outdoor garden that comes back year after year, you and your students can be part of this exciting event.

All participants receive a $10 off a $50 purchase at Lowe’s, and the opportunity to be awarded a $5,000 grant in recognition of their garden project. Join youth gardening groups across the country and be part of the movement - Sign up for the Green Thumb Challenge Today!

The DOE ACTS 3 year program includes participating in research project(s) at a national laboratory, implementing technology-supported inquiry with students, educational leadership, using Web 2.0 collaboration tools and online meetings for follow-up support, and financial support for classroom equipment and further professional development.

Fermilab is offering a limited number of positions in its DOE ACTS cohort starting in the summer of 2010. Priority for this cohort will be given to mid-level teachers (grades 5-9).

Participants will meet at Fermilab for four weeks each summer for three years. During the academic year following each summer, as participants implement their summer work in their schools and work on small projects, they will be supported by program staff and by each other, primarily through online meetings, with one or two face-to-face meetings as well.

The program combines three strands of professional development: scientific research, teaching & learning, and educational leadership. Each year teachers will participate in a research project which will be woven together with the other two strands to strengthen and reinforce one another.

Participants will receive an $800/week stipend for their summer work. Non-local participants will also receive housing and travel. All participants will be eligible for grants to support classroom equipment purchases and travel to professional development conferences.

How to apply: Go to www.scied.science.doe.gov and click on DOE ACTS under “Programs for Teachers.” To apply, use the “Apply” link on the floating navigation bar on the left side of your screen.
When filling out your application, please consider the following:
-The application does not need to be completed in one sitting. You may save your work and return later.
-Different national laboratories have different programs. You will be asked for two lab preferences.
-Applicants are required to obtain two recommendations. These must be submitted online.
Your recommenders will use a unique website that is provided as part of your application.
-Early submission of the completed application is strongly encouraged.

Eligibility:
-Full-time middle and high school science and mathematics teachers in public or private school.
-Must be at least 21 years old and a United States Citizen at the time of application.
-Must have current health insurance coverage.

Contact:
Please contact Spencer Pasero (spasero@fnal.gov, 630-840-3076) with any questions about the program.

No access to a microscope? Check out the Exploratorium’s Microscope Imaging Station — you can see videos of sea urchin cells dividing, stem cells, a zebrafish heart cell beating, and more. Any of the images here can be used in educational settings.

You can also build a cell model, and “scale up” cell and organelle dimensions to human scale. If a cell was the size of my head, how big would a mitochrondria be? Or, build a 3D diaorama inside a shoebox. One teacher uses the analogy of a school — the nucleus is the principal’s office, the DNA is the school files, the teachers are the ribosomes, the students would be proteins, and the school bus is a vesicle. Or, list a set of different analogies (the cell is like “The Simpsons”, the cell is like “a city”) and let students choose, and make their set of analogical functions.

You can also model a cell membrane using soap film. You can stick a wet finger through a bubble film, just like plasma membranes are selectively permeable. See this activity here.

This Traits of Life website at the Exploratorium has a set of online interactives and downloadable posters and articles.

You can do a play or drama about the cell — here’s an example about the Immune System from a teaching tips podcast.

Original posting on the sciencegeekgirl blog

Juanita Constible spent her holidays in an unusual way - traveling to the coldest, windiest, driest, and highest place on Earth! She’s on a scientific expedition with four other scientists from Miami University (OH) and Ohio State University, studying an unusual insect’s ability to survive cold temperatures.

We were lucky enough to interview Juanita about her trip!

BPPB: Tell us a bit about yourself.

JC: I am a technical analyst—sort of like a scientific advisor—with National Wildlife Federation’s coastal Louisiana program. I was trained as a wildlife ecologist and have studied a variety of animals across Canada and the U.S. I’ve been interested in science education since I was a graduate student, and enjoy sharing my love of nature and science with people of all ages.

BPPB: What is the purpose of your trip to Antarctica?

JC: I’m going to Antarctica with four other scientists to study the southernmost free-living insect in the world. This insect is called Belgica antarctica, but we call it Belgica for short because it doesn’t have a common name. In addition to helping the scientists, I will be sharing our experiences with K-12 students and teachers.

Belgica larvae on mud.

BPPB: How did you become interested in Belgica?

JC: I used to be the lab manager for the Laboratory of Ecophysiological Cryobiology at Miami University. The scientists in this lab study how animals like frogs, turtles, and flies survive extreme cold. Belgica was the most interesting study animal to me because it lives in Antarctica. Before I worked at Miami University, I had no idea there were insects, mites, ticks, or any other invertebrates in Antarctica.

Why is Belgica special? Why is your team studying it?

JC: Belgica is a tough little fly! It can survive freezing, the loss of over 70% of its body water, wide swings in pH, immersion in salt water, and long stretches with little to no oxygen. Over the next three years, the team will do field and laboratory studies to answer these questions:

Does Belgica typically survive the winter by freezing or dehydrating?

What role do proteins (specifically aquaporins and dehydrins) play in the winter survival of Belgica?

How does Belgica “know” when it’s time to get ready for winter?

BPPB: How did you get the chance to travel to Antarctica?

JC: Mostly luck, I think! Seriously, though, having science and education experience and a heck of a lot of enthusiasm helped.

BPPB: Tell us about the preparation for your trip.

JC: The most complicated part was the physical qualification process. Everyone spending part of a field season at a U.S. base in Antarctica has to meet minimum health requirements—which means lots of tests, lots of dental work, and lots of paperwork. The health requirements are for everyone’s safety, as it can be difficult, dangerous, and very expensive to get someone out of Antarctica quickly in the case of a medical emergency.

BPPB: Can we learn more about your trip? How can we follow along with your adventures?

JC: Absolutely! We have a blog (http://frozenfly.edublogs.org), a Facebook fan page (Miami University’s Antarctic Connection), and a website (http://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab). And I love answering questions. The best way to get in touch is through the comment section on our blog. That way, everybody gets to see the answers.

BPPB: How can teachers use this information in their classrooms?

JC: We’re going to touch on life science, physical science, history, math, and a bunch of other subjects, so there are connections to your entire curriculum. Consider using the materials as:

A daily reading warm up.

A hook for a science lesson on biological form and function, food webs, weather and climate, phase shifts of water, or another theme. Check out some of our polar lesson plans here: http://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab/education/AntarcticLessons.htm

Inspiration for a creative writing or journaling activity. For example, you could ask students to spend a few days writing blog entries about their home town from the perspective of a tourist.

A source of videos, sound clips, or photos for art projects or public speaking assignments.

A tool to encourage students to interact responsibly and safely with adults and their peers online.

Thanks to Juanita for answering our questions! Do you know of someone we should interview on the blog? Post a comment - we’d love to hear from you!

Your students may find it difficult to believe that the concepts of probability really have anything to do with everyday life. If they did, would they still grow up to buy all those lottery tickets? In the Powerball Lottery, the largest in the Unites States, the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 195,200,000!

So says the Book of Odds, which offers blogs, articles, and thousands of thoroughly researched odds on accidents and death, daily life and activities, health and illness, relationships and society. Its carefully calculated probabilities range from the odds of being the only one to survive a plane crash, to the odds of having a heart attack, to the odds of having ever eaten cold pizza for breakfast.

Once your students are immersed in these odds, you might like to introduce the Game of Skunk. Playing and analyzing the game engages students in real-world applications of probabilistic thinking as they examine choice versus chance and practice decision-making.

On the purely theoretical level, your class would enjoy meeting the Smithville Families. This lesson explores the probabilities for the births of boys and girls in a large family. The outcome of a coin toss is used to indicate the birth of a boy or girl. And then you might compare the conclusions reached with those found in the Book of Odds.

My prediction is high on your enjoying these resources!

If middle schoolers are cutting out paper snowflakes for holiday decorations and one student insists on cutting white triangles, that’s okay. The six-sided snowflake is most often depicted, but three-sided snowflakes are not uncommon. They’ve been observed in nature for hundreds of years. Noted snowflake photographer W.A. Bentley (celebrated in the Caldecott Medal Book Bentley’s Snowflakes) and other scientists recorded them.

Physicists Kenneth G. Libbrecht and H. M. Arnold have created triangular snowflakes, as well as hexagons, in their laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. They found that the majority of flakes grown in a vapor diffusion chamber were hexagons but more than they had estimated became triangles, leading them to look for the trigger that turns hexagons into triangular shapes.

According to the authors in their published report, ”We have been studying the detailed physics of snow crystals as a case study in crystal growth, with the hope that developing a comprehensive mechanistic model for this specific system will shed light on the more general problem of structure formation during solidification.”

A single small growth perturbation on the forming hexagon flake resulted in a distorted, or triangular, shape under certain aerodynamic conditions. The perturbation caused the falling flake to tilt up. The airflow around the crystal produced instability in the growth of the facets, creating the triangular shape. After the triangular shape is initially formed, the flake stays triangular during the rest of its fall.

Libbrecht and Arnold point out, “The growth of triangular snow crystals is another piece in the puzzle that describes the many interconnected mechanisms by which complex structures emerge spontaneously during solidification.”

For all those interested in snowflakes, Libbrecht created the web site SnowCrystals.com, with photo galleries of real and synthetic flakes, frequently asked questions, tips on photographing crystals and preserving them, snow activities for all age groups, and more. Libbrecht used a specially designed snowflake photomicroscope to photograph flakes. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service used his photos as a set of commemorative stamps.

More Snowflake Studies. At Purdue University, a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, Travis Knepp, has been growing ice crystals in his lab, subjecting the crystals to temperatures ranging from 110 degrees Fahrenheit down to minus 50 degrees. A press release from the university reports that Knepp’s experiments are part of his study of ground-level ozone depletion in the Arctic.

Knepp explains, “Most people have probably heard of ozone depletion in the North and South Poles. This occurs in the stratosphere, about 15 miles up, What people don’t know is that we also see ozone levels decrease significantly at ground level.” The complex chemical reactions that take place on the snow crystal’s surface cause the release of chemicals that reduce ozone at ground level. “How fast these reactions occur is partially limited by the snow crystals’ surface area,” he said. His findings are published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Take an online survey about your needs around teaching about climate and earn a $5 gift certificate for your time!

This survey will help the CIRES Education and Outreach Group at the University of Colorado at Boulder design a set of NASA-funded professional development experiences for teachers about climate and climate change. GLOBE and the National Science Digital Library are partners in this project.

They need 200 middle and high school STEM teachers to participate by December 15, 2009. Log on now as the gift certificates will go fast!

It will take you about 10 minutes to complete the survey.

If you are interested, please email Susan Lynds for the survey link at susan.lynds@colorado.edu.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to help us design our professional development to meet your needs! For more information about the project, see http://cires.colorado.edu/education/k12/ICEE/index.html.

If you want to encourage your middle school students to” be the best they can be,” here are two competitions for you to consider.  Both are national and aimed at promoting high achievement through regular math meetings.  At least one person on staff will have to head the program, teach the high standard mathematics required on the tests, hold practice contests, and generally push, encourage, and applaud.

MATHCOUNTS is a national competition developed for U.S. middle school students. Its program promotes mathematics achievement through grassroots involvement in every U.S. state and territory. You will find here all the information on how to register and how to prepare your students for the yearly competitions held throughout the country.  

Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools
Created for grades 4-6 and 6-8, this program aims to enhance students’ problem-solving skills. I especially like the two grade ranges. Math clubs meet weekly for an hour, when students explore a topic or strategy in depth, or practice for the contests. All information on how to structure the clubs and prepare students is included here. 

Finally, a third contest, not strictly mathematical, but you and a science teacher might find it challenging for your students who like to work “hands-on.” The West Point Bridge Design Contest is a challenge for U.S. students age 13 through grade 12. The purpose of the contest is to provide middle school and high school students with a realistic, engaging introduction to engineering. They can learn about how engineers use the computer as a problem-solving tool, about truss bridges and how they work, about engineering through a realistic, hands-on problem-solving experience, and about the engineering design process. Students design a truss bridge using the award-winning West Point Bridge Designer software (absolutely free!). At the site, you can register for this year’s competition and also learn how to set up a local bridge design contest.

Good luck to your team!!!

Real data and citizen science projects are wonderful ways to engage students, but they often are best conducted during the fall and spring. What’s a teacher to do in the colder months of winter?

 The new Snowtweets Project from the University of Waterloo has one answer. The Snowtweets Project provides a way for people interested in snow measurements to quickly broadcast their own snow depth measurements to the web. These data are then picked up by our database and mapped in near real time. The project uses the micro-blogging site Twitter as its data broadcasting scheme.

Participants can use a data visualization tool called Snowbird that allows them to explore the reported snow depths around the globe. The viewer shows where the reports are located and how much snow there is at each reported site.

How can you participate in Snowtweets?

1. Register for a free Twitter account at www.twitter.com.

2. Measure the snow depth where you live, work, or play.

3. Use your Twitter account to tweet the information to the project.

See more detailed instructions at http://snowcore.uwaterloo.ca/snowtweets/snowbird/.

How could we organize a math fair? And what kinds of projects would our students present? I’m not thinking here of projects that would be judged, as in a science fair, but rather investigations and activities that would engage middle school students and be presented for the whole school as well as parents. One idea comes from a 7th grade class at Frisbie Middle School in Rialto, California.

Multicultural Math Fair
Ten activities for the fair, each based on a different cultural heritage, are well described in both Spanish and English. Included here are tips on how to set up a math fair as well as student handouts and free software for specific activities, such as the Tower of Hanoi. You will also find links to resources for related activities, such as studying symmetry and patterns in Navajo rugs. A unique teacher-created site!

If you are looking for more project ideas, here are some I think would make great fair presentations and involve students in learning sound math:

Pascal’s Triangle
Here are three ways to explore the famous triangle: by finding patterns and relations within the triangle, solving a pizza toppings problem in Antonio’s Pizza Palace, or working with an interactive web unit. The set of three investigations could work well as one fair project.

The Noon Day Project: Measuring the Circumference of the Earth
In the course of this online project, students learn about Eratosthenes and his experiment, do a similar experiment by collaborating with other schools, and analyze and reflect on the collected data to determine the accuracy of their measurements and what they learned. The project provides detailed instructions, activities, reference materials, online help, and a teacher area.

The Global Sun Temperature Project
This website allows students from around the world to work together to determine how average daily temperatures and hours of sunlight change with distance from the equator. Educators can find project information, lesson plans, and implementation assistance. Participants can submit their project data, pictures, and final reports.

The Data Library
This web site contains an extensive list of ongoing data-sharing projects that would work well as fair projects. It also offers a great set of links to data on population, baseball stats, minimum wage, etc., excellent for students working on any statistics project.

Polyhedra in the Classroom
A set of activities developed for middle school students on aspects of polyhedra. The teacher-creator, Suzanne Alejandre, includes not only instructions for each activity but also assessment suggestions and her mathematical objectives for the unit.

Down the Drain
This Internet-based collaborative project allows students to share information about water usage with other students from around the country and the world. Based on data collected by their household members and their classmates, students determine the average amount of water used by one person in a day. They then compare this to the average amount of water used per person per day in other parts of the world. Students publish reports, photos, or other work for the fair presentation.