What Causes the Seasons (Computer)

Use a Go!Temp to measure the temperatures of simulated Earth's seasons.

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Learning Objectives

Monitor simulated warming of your city by the sun in the winter.
Monitor simulated warming of your city by the sun in the summer.
Interpret your results.

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What Causes the Seasons? Lab Book: Middle School Science with Vernier

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Standards Correlation
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Go!Temp	Order Code: GO-TEMP	$39
Middle School Science with Vernier	Order Code: MSV	$48

National Science Education Standard Correlations

A.1.3.a Grades 5-8	The use of tools and techniques, including mathematics, will be guided by the question asked and the investigations students design. The use of computers for the collection, summary, and display of evidence is part of this standard. Students should be able to access, gather, store, retrieve, and organize data, using hardware and software designed for these purposes.
A.1.7.a Grades 5-8	With practice, students should become competent at communicating experimental methods, following instructions, describing observations, summarizing the results of other groups, and telling other students about investigations and explanations.
A.1.8.a Grades 5-8	Mathematics is essential to asking and answering questions about the natural world. Mathematics can be used to ask questions; to gather, organize, and present data; and to structure convincing explanations.
A.2.1 Grades 5-8	Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigations. Some investigations involve observing and describing objects, organisms, or events; some involve collecting specimens; some involve experiments; some involve seeking more information; some involve discovery of new objects and phenomena; and some involve making models.
D.3.4 Grades 5-8	The sun is the major source of energy for phenomena on the earth's surface, such as growth of plants, winds, ocean currents, and the water cycle. Seasons result from variations in the amount of the sun's energy hitting the surface, due to the tilt of the earth's rotation on its axis and the length of the day.
E.2.3 Grades 5-8	Science and technology are reciprocal. Science helps drive technology, as it addresses questions that demand more sophisticated instruments and provides principles for better instrumentation and technique. Technology is essential to science, because it provides instruments and techniques that enable observations of objects and phenomena that are otherwise unobservable due to factors such as quantity, distance, location, size, and speed. Technology also provides tools for investigations, inquiry, and analysis.
G.2.1 Grades 5-8	Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models. Although all scientific ideas are tentative and subject to change and improvement in principle, for most major ideas in science, there is much experimental and observational confirmation. Those ideas are not likely to change greatly in the future. Scientists do and have changed their ideas about nature when they encounter new experimental evidence that does not match their existing explanations.

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