This project has students work in pairs explore the botany of Harvard Square. Students find a plant-related item to research and prepare a an abstract, a presentation, and a written report.
This activity teaches skills in critical assessment of the peer-reviewed published literature. It focuses on analysis of clinical trials in mental health, but the principles and methods are readily generalizable to other scientific literature. The “Smackdown” approach represents an augmentation of the traditional “journal club” mode of teaching critical scientific reading skills.
In Animal Cognition, Dr. Irene Pepperberg's students learn how to evaluate scholarly work on animal cognition by trying to think from the animal's point of view of the experiment.
Professor Nathan Kaplan uses popular websites and online data to generate discussion about the topic of correlation in his math gen ed, "Fat Chance." According to Kaplan, the purpose of the activity is to show students that correlations are everywhere, even in movie rentals, library cards, etc., and part of the era of big data is that companies will know lots of things about people even if they don't tell them.
Students apply what they have learned in the classroom to their own dinner plates by creating a meal based on principles of health and sustainability that are attentive to personal, local, and global considerations.
Students develop a greenhouse gas inventory and reduction plan for a business, non-profit, government entity, or other institution by working with the organization to understand their sources of emissions and find practical methods of reducing them.
Created by Khoa Nguyen, Michal Brylinski, Benjamin Maas, Kristy Stensaas, Suniti Karunatillake, Achim Herrmann, and Wolfgang Kramer, this teachable unit aims to implicitly enable scientific modeling skills among the students. With developing a conceptual model from a set of observations as the underlying goal, variations in atmospheric oxygen content provides context.
This is an in-section activity created by John Huth for his Primitive Navigation course where students walk small distances and use their analysis to learn small angle approximation, statistics, and prepares them for future assignments.
In this simulation activity, students decide which of two companies, each using a different CRISPR genome-editing technology, to invest in. They engage with research on CRISPR genome editing to understand how unintended consequences of one technology used for this editing had real-world business implications. The storytelling element adds immediacy to the activity, making it imaginative and engaging, and students are pushed toward achieving higher levels of competence within Bloom’s taxonomy for the subject area.
In this activity, students choose a recent journal article on tissue engineering and then lead a 30-minute discussion with the class on the chosen article.
There has been an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease. Which policy is best based on the scientific estimations of how many people will be saved? This activity uses this example with poll everywhere (polleverywhere.com) technology to demonstrate framing and prospect theory.
In her Expos section, Jerusha Achterberg teaches how to clearly describe the methods that will be used in a subsequent paper. This activity was motivated by the fact that students were having trouble writing the methods section in their final paper proposals.
