Homework and Laboratory Exercises

One of the easiest ways to begin is to put your favorite classroom or homework exercises on the Internet. Often, such exercises can standalone and, as such, can be of some utility to other instructors or students. A few examples follow along with a link to a catalog of laboratory exercises. Many of the exercises that follow are not "interactive". They are included to give the readers ideas for the development of their own exercises.

If you would like to have your students use these (or other Internet-based) exercises, please contact the developer. Most are quite willing but turning your 200 students loose on a resources could overload a small server.

1. Building Stones of Toronto
   "WALKING TOUR TO STUDY SOME OF THE BUILDING STONES USED IN TORONTO Most building stones in Toronto are of igneous or sedimentary origin, but metamorphic rocks are also represented. Intrusive igneous rocks have a coarse inter-locking texture; they are durable and polish well. Sedimentary rocks are generally softer and more porous; they are commonly used for ornamental purposes such as carved entablatures over doorways or fluted columns. Metamorphic rocks are represented by a variety of marbles and gneisses, and are generally used as polished facing stones on interior and exterior walls." This is an exercise which could be adapted to the area around your university.

2. Discovering Plate Boundaries
   "A classroom exercise designed to allow students to discover the properties of tectonic plates and their boundaries. "Discovering Plate Boundaries" has been used with students from Eighth Grade to Undergraduates at Rice University."

3. Dangerous Earth
   Five exercises - earthquakes, volcanoes, caves and sinkholes, tsunami, and an introduction to geology.

4. Earth Science OnLine Tutorial Center
   From Cerritos College, California. Interactive tutorials for topographic maps, earth processes, and more.

5. Earthquake Laboratory
   "A minor earthquake (magnitude 3.6) occurred in northern California during the afternoon of March 15, 1985. Short-period seismographs from 3 stations (DBM, SRM, WGL) in northern California recorded this event. Portions of the seismic records from each of these 6 stations are given below. Vertical lines on the seismograms represent 2 second intervals (1 cm = 2 secs). In general there was little seismic activity prior to this earthquake, so that the seismograph at each station was quiet before the first arrival from this earthquake. "

6. Homework Exercises for Environmental Geology
   Tulane University. Disasters, Seismology, Volcanoes, Mass Wasting, Flooding and Weather.

7. Interactive Models for Geologic Education
   "Welcome! This site provides interactive computer models to aid in undergraduate geological education. Please feel free to browse and download our products. These interactive models were created for the Macintosh, and have been saved as Binhexed archives. You may need the SuperCard¹ Player 3.0.1 to use some of the models. Here are some highlights:"

8. Flooding Exercise
   University of Cincinnati. "A flood is usually caused by a stream that has overflowed its banks during periods of high runoff. Floods occur when the water height or stage of a stream, commonly measured by a stream guage, passes some predetermined level, which is usually taken as the bank-full stage. When the stream channel can no longer accommodate the increased discharge it overflows its banks. This exercise is designed to explore the nature of floods and flood prediction. "

9. Interpreting Earth History
   " With a cross section view we can begin to apply our geological principles -- superposition, original horizontality, cross-cutting relationships, ... -- and begin to work out the sequence of events that produced the materials beneath the surface. Look at the cross section given above and, when you are ready, take a short quiz to see how well you can decipher Earth history. "

10. Landslides
    University of Cincinnati. " Landslides and mass movements involve the downslope movement of rock and/or soil and other surficial materials under the influence of gravity. Movement in landslides is generally rapid and takes place such that the center of gravity moves in a downward and outward direction. In this example, water-saturated bedrock and regolith fail along a curved surface and produce a landslide."

11. Oceanography Laboratories
    California State University @ San Jose."Sea water covers 71% of the earth's surface or 360 million square kilometers and composes 97% of the earth's water thus making our planet a unique body within our solar system. Several bodies in our solar system may have sheets of ice and one moon of Jupiter may have an ocean, but the extent and amount of sea water on earth is special.

12. Physical Geology Lab
    from Texas A&M University. Power Point presentations covering the background needed for a Physical Geology laboratory course. This is a good resource for Teaching Assistants as well as for the students themselves

13. Subduction Zone Exercise
    Columbia University -- Study the relationship between bathymetry, volcanoes and earthquakes for a subduction zone."

14. Topographic Maps
    Clavert College. "Two exercises are included on this map, and this screen will serve as an index to the individual exercises. The lower box provides a link to an exercise on scale reading. The middle box leads to exercise in reading contour lines. And the upper box represents an exercise on flood-plain analysis that is still in the works".

15. Thematic Maps
    Occidental College. "From this page, you can access various thematic maps covering parts of Los Angeles County. These GIF images are derived from graphics created in COREL Draw by Prof. Scott Bogue (Geology, Occidental College). They are all based on maps originally compiled and drafted by Prof. James Sadd."

16. The Image Tasks Exercises
    From the Visualizing Earth Project at UCSD.

17. Volcano Project
    the University of Houston. These exercises are a mix of data gathering, data analysis, and data synthesis.

January 15, 2001

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