The Universe started with a big BANG over ten billion years ago. And then what happened? Find out as we travel through the history of the Universe, concentrating on the last 4.6 billion years as we discover how unique are own planet is. We’ll learn how scientists determine when ancient events occurred, and we’ll also develop metaphors for understanding the magnitude of numbers like “4.6 billion.” We’ll see how the atmosphere evolved, and what its components are; the ins and outs of gravity; scientific ideas that explain the origins of life; and the earliest fossils on Earth. Classes alternate between active lectures and laboratory activities. This course provides a rare opportunity to integrate sciences from diverse fields at an introductory level.
Bryson, B. A 2003. Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books: New York, 544 p. I strongly recommend the special illustrated edition
Selected readings by Andy Knoll, Ken Miller, Dava Sobel and Carl Zimmer.
In this computer lab, we employs spreadsheets to
Design a worksheet for 6th graders to complete about the volcano section and the rhino cave of the “Life and Times of Washington State”. What are their learning objectives? Make sure your worksheet guides them through activities that help them meet the objectives. Do you want them to fill out the worksheets? Or do you want to suggest activities to the chaperones? What can you do to instill in the students a desire to return to the museum?
Check out specimens of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks to understand the rock cycle. You'll choose one of the rocks from this lab and write a story from its perspective (as Dava Sobel does in the reading assigned for today). Use evidence from class, lab and your readings. Be sure to describe what you look like, your texture, how you were formed, what you witnessed as you formed, how you were collected, and what you have been doing since your collection. Add additional details as you see fit. Write 200-300 words.
Explore the five major mechanisms of evolution by modeling them with Hershey's kisses. The best part is when a Hershey kiss dies... Here's an example of one of the experiments you'll perform:
Mutation
Begin with 50 candies, 25 plain kisses and 25 peanut butter kisses. Flip a coin 25 times to see who dies. Every “head” means a plain kiss dies, and every tail means a peanut butter kiss dies. Let all the plain kisses reproduce.
But let’s see if the peanut butter kisses mutate into plain ones when they reproduce. Let’s say the odds of mutating are one-in-three. Roll the die for each remaining peanut butter kiss. If you get a one or a two, then the offspring of that peanut butter kiss is a plain kiss. Otherwise, the offspring are the same as the parents. Continue through six generations total.
We read an article by Signor and Lipps (1982) from the primary literature that explains why we don't find dinosaurs immediately at the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction boundary. The authors' argument is mathematical, and we work through their logic as a team in one of the computer labs.