What does it mean for something to grow exponentially, and how does that compare to linear growth? This activity tries to help learners gain an understanding of these concepts while modeling real-world problems. Linear and exponential...

Build up from the previous activity where your learners charted the population growth and decay of a fish pond with M&Ms®. Have them look at the data from that activity and create a Now-Next, or recursive equations, to predict the...

Free yourself from the shackles of traditional math lessons. Young mathematicians investigate race, gender, and age differences in California's prison system. They use provided graphics to compare the prison population with the state's...

Skeeters are used to model linear and exponential population growth in a wonderfully organized lesson plan including teachers' and students' notes, an assignment, graphs, tables, and equations. Filled with constant deep-reaching...

Your young microbiologists will interpret and solve exponential equations in this real-world context task set in a hospital research scenario. Learners think in terms of the functions as well as their rates of change. 

In this real-world problem about the rapid growth of rabbit populations, students must analyze two different scenarios and create mathematical models to represent them. They use their exponential models to answer questions about the...

We all drink milk as babies, so why can't we all drink it as adults? Examine the trend in lactase production on the world-wide scale as science scholars analyze and interpret data. Groups create pie charts from the data, place them on a...

What's the link between lactase persistence and dairy farming? Biology scholars analyze data to find evidence of the connection, then relate this to human adaptation. Working individually and in small groups, learners view short video...

More than half the world's population eats rice as a daily staple ... imagine if that rice could prevent illness. Scientists genetically engineered rice to include vitamin A for just that purpose. However, room for debate still exists....

What better way to study survey design than to design your own survey! Bring a versatile data analysis project to your AP Statistics class, and encourage them to apply the practices from their instructions to a real-world survey...

Designing a travel brochure is a classic project that will help your class members develop a variety of skills, such as researching informational texts, designing creative visual products, and communicating what you have learned.

Assume all you know is that the variable Q represents a value that is bigger than the value represented by the variable P. Which is larger P + Q or 2P? The problems in this activity get more complex than...

How does your state compare? Using census data, scholars determine the total population and the number of 11-year-old boys and girls in two different states. They round and compare values, and then make up a question about the two...

With so many tons of trash going into landfills each year, your environmentalists can calculate how much the average person is tossing away. This activity has a series of questions not only requiring math, but a conscious thought of how...

Ecology candidates culture pond water organisms over a few days time, then they experiment to find out how increasing nutrients affects the population. As part of a unit on water, this exploration gives your class an understanding of how...

Here learners get to flex some serious algebraic muscles through an investigation of logistic growth. The properties of the constant terms in the logistic growth formula are unraveled in a short but content-dense...

You may not know if that zebrafish in your fish tank is a model citizen—but it is definitely a model organism! What can we learn about ourselves from a tiny zebrafish? Discover more about the polygenic trait of skin color through a...

Here is a great textbook chapter on China's establishment as a communist state in 1949 and the effects of World War II on the nation. The first page prompts learners to complete a timeline activity as they read the material,...

Protect the world from energy depletion—join the Energy Intelligence Agency. Using a set of cards, pupils distinguish between correct and incorrect information regarding energy use in the United States. They analyze graphs and diagrams...

Climate affects populations in different ways. Scholars research extinct organisms and mass extinctions in part three of the 10-installment Discover Your Changing World series. They create graphic organizers, then fill in the...

Give your young learners the chance to discover more about countries in their world community with a research project. Class members write reports on an assigned country and include such major features as geography, important historical...

When thinking about the American whaling industry most imagine Moby Dick and Nantucket sleigh rides, harpoons and scrimshaw, whale-oil lamps and baleen in women's corsets. But it may come as a surprise that the industry was also...

There is nothing in the world quite like a bee. Here is a video that explains the importance of bees to pollination. Scholars consider possible solutions to the declining population of bees in the ninth and final installment in the series.

Every time you purchase something from the store, it goes into a bag, but what happens to the bag? This lesson encourages your learners to think about what happens to those plastic and paper bags and their effect on the environment. Use...