James Snyder and his student, Cali Mendoza, a junior at Anderson Valley High School in Boonville, CA, recently sent a LabQuest 2 and several sensors up with a weather balloon that traveled into near space. They estimate that the balloon reached 25,0...

Recently the FAA and the airlines changed the rules to allow the use of tablets during takeoffs and landings. We could not resist getting acceleration data using the iPad’s built-in accelerometers and Graphical Analysis for iPad®, iPhone®,...

If you are looking for inquiry-based activities that focus on bioenergy and biofuels, you should take a look at the classroom materials that are available on the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center for Education & Outreach website. The mission...

Investigating Loops and Coils with Vernier Sensors New Zealand electrical engineer, Patrick Herd, used Vernier sensors to help Swedish teens prepare for the International Young Physicists’ Tournament last year. One of the problems the students wer...

Get a visual representation of thermal equilibration by placing a small petri dish of cold water inside a larger petri dish of warm water. Use the FLIR ONE™ thermal camera and the Thermal Analysis app to determine the time it takes to reach th...

Studying soil is an easy, yet often overlooked, way to introduce students to the role of cellular respiration in the carbon cycle. The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) has developed a set of free classroom materials to guide educators th...

Aquatic plants undergo photosynthesis and cellular respiration much like terrestrial plants. Oxygen dissolves into water when aquatic autotrophs release oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Dissolved oxygen can be measured directly to determine ...

Are you interested in spectroscopy but don’t know where to begin? You are in luck! We’ve recently designed a new experiment, “A Guided Inquiry Approach to Understanding Fluorescence Spectroscopy,” to help students understand what goes on ins...

Paul Osuna, science teacher at Rancho Del Rey Middle School in Chula Vista, California, sent us a new take on the “Angle of Insolation” experiment found in several of our lab books. His intent is to eliminate the concept of Earth’s tilt from t...

Many schools can’t afford a classroom set of spectrophotometers. So how can you use a single spectrophotometer and a class set of colorimeters to have your students discover the best wavelength of light to use in an experiment? For Beer’s law ...