Approaches and skills:
Demonstration - interactive class demonstration
Experiment - your students carry out an experiment of our design;
Data-gathering - your students carry out an experiment in which data must be gathered and compared in order to determine the outcome
Design - students have a hand in designing the experiment they will carry out
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GENERAL SCIENCE
SCIENTIFIC METHOD: A simple class project that demonstrates scientific method (class participation; group interaction)
CHIRALITY: Chirality is a general feature of the physical world that appears in biological, chemical, geological and physical systems (demonstration)
BIOLOGY
FOOLING YOUR BRAIN: How the nervous system uses comparison and adjustment to interact with the surrounding world; includes optical illusions (demonstration; experimentation)*
TWO-POINT DISCRIMINATION: How the sense of touch is organized to provide varying levels of sensitivity (data-gathering)
TASTE BUD LOCALIZATION: How taste buds are organized on the tongue according to their characteristic sensitivities to salt, sweet, sour or bitter (experimentation)
SOUND LOCALIZATION: How the auditory system is organized to allow for the localization of a sound source (demonstration; experimentation)
BINOCULAR VISION: How our system of binocular vision allows for depth perception (demonstration; data-gathering)
VESTIBULAR SYSTEM: How our vestibular system allows us to maintain our sense of balance and detect body movement (class participation, demonstration; experimentation)
THE SENSES AND OBSERVATION: How the different senses contribute to the powers of observation (class participation; experimentation)
CONDUCTION VELOCITY: How the nervous system conducts signals along nerves, and across a series of cells (class participation)
NEUROPHYSIOLOGY THEATER: The ionic functioning of the nervous system can be demonstrated by having students play the roles of various ions, channels and receptors; this exercise could be applied to almost any biological system (class participation)
CHEMISTRY
FUNCTIONAL CHEMISTRY: How fundamental chemical principles can be demonstrated with everyday objects (demonstration; experimental design)
PHYSICS
BASIC PHYSICAL UNITS AND CONSTANTS: An exploration of some of the fundamentals of physics, including density, volume and solid-liquid-gas relationships (demonstration; experimentation)
ELECTRICITY WITHOUT WIRES: How electricity works, and some unusual ways of generating it (experimentation; experimental design)
MAGNETS AND STATIC ELECTRICITY: An exploration of the properties of magnets and static electricity (experimentation)
GRAVITY: The effect of gravity and air resistance on various objects (demonstration; class participation)*
LONG-TERM PROJECTS
AVOCADO FARMERS: How plant seeds germinate and grow and their physical and nutritional needs (data-gathering; experimental design)
GUPPIES: An exploration of the physical and nutritional needs of aquatic vertebrates (data- gathering; experimental design)
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