In this activity students work together in groups or as individuals on computers to understand how we can use photometric observations of stars to discover exoplanets.
Every aspect of Math 121 is highly interactive: Students spend most of class time working in groups on problems and they then present their work and discuss as a class. Each student is responsible for some part of the in-class problems.
Each student is assigned to a country and asked to represent that country's views in a simulated debate to represent the War Guilt Clause negotiations at Versailles.
Are people predisposed to favor their own groups at the expense of others, even when the group distinction is completely arbitrary? This activity replicates, more or less, the exact experiment used by Henri Tajfel to demonstrate the "minimal group paradigm" used in Social Identity Theory.
Assigned debates work well for weeks where several competing theoretical approaches are covered. This debate involves competing theories on approaches to explaining political attitudes.
This group discussion format can be used in a week that covers several big concepts, each of which can be discussed along a similar ("parallel") sequence of discussion questions. The concepts in this particular class are: Wisdom of crowds, Heuristic decision-making, Groupthink, and Cooperation.
Should anabolic steroids remain banned? What about research cloning? In this activity, students work on constructing clear argumentative moral arguments using bioethical prompts.
In this "murder mystery" activity, a beloved professor has been murdered in his mansion. The students have to take on the roles of different characters and, using Portuguese past verb tenses and relevant vocabulary, solve the mystery.
Students watch an excerpt of a foreign language film without sound and work in groups to craft a sample dialogue utilizing new vocabulary and grammar concepts.