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In this two-part activity, students make inferences about the relationships between egg size, incubation time, and bird size from data sets collected from hundreds of species of birds. Students will also investigate how…
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Could a bug ever be the size of a Volkswagen Beetle? Could a dragonfly be larger than a seagull? Movies often portray huge creatures that roam the Earth and sometimes terrorize humans. Could these scenarios actually…
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Across the different sciences one of the common challenges that researchers encounter is defining and measuring different variables. An essential part of that process is creating and using scales. In this investigation…
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Flying Foam: The Scale of Forces
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The forces that are important for very large objects can be quite different than the forces that are important for very small objects. A planet is essentially unaffected by all but the gravitational force, whereas a…
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The same material may behave differently at different scales. These variations can become critical in understanding science at very large or very small scales. In this investigation, students use Styrofoam to explore…
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Fractals: Self-Similar at Different Scales
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Fractal geometry enables researchers to analyze complex shapes of natural objects and compare one system to another. It helps us define structure in new and useful ways. Moreover, if an object in a geological or…
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Screening My Calls: Scale and the Electromagnetic Spectrum
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Light is just one type of electromagnetic radiation; it belongs to the visible portion of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. The other regions of the EM spectrum include everything from gamma rays to radio waves. They…
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Stringy Chemistry and States of Matter
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Solids, liquids, and gases are familiar to students as the different states of matter. Why are some substances gases and some solid at room temperature? This exercise helps students explore the basic concepts behind…
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Our sensory organs are finely tuned instruments that not only detect but also measure different environmental inputs. In particular, our eyes, ears, and nose are extraordinary sensors. The tasks these organs face are…
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Beetlemice Multitudes!!! Power Law and Exponential Scaling
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Scaling describes how a quantity changes over time or with the size of a system. It can also be defined as how a quantity changes in relation to any other parameter. When you stop and think about it, all of the…
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Oops, I Did It Again: Errors in Measurement
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Understanding the precision and accuracy of measurements is a crucial skill that scientists must develop to do their work. All measurements involve some degree of error. Knowing how to assess and work with error is an…
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Is a virus bigger than a bacterium? Is the distance from the Earth to the Moon greater than the diameter of the Earth? In this investigation, students explore the relative sizes of things through a card-sorting activity…
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It’s Not All Relative: Relative Versus Absolute
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Learning about the sizes of things and scale engages students in thinking about conceptual benchmarks for sizes. In this investigation, students learn to order objects on a relative scale, as well as to accurately label…
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Time Flies When You’re Learning About Scale!
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Not many students would forget to say “Dinosaurs!” if you mention the Jurassic period, yet the word scale only conjures up ideas of measuring objects. Most students automatically think of measuring mass, volume, or…
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Billions of Us: Scale and Population
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Population is increasingly important as both a scientific and a political subject. The world is getting more crowded. Providing students with the tools to understand population numbers is not only important for their…
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