Math-Sci-Guy

This laboratory activity about Earthquake Depths is a great math-science crossover! It gives students practice with latitude & longitude and helps them process the fact that earthquakes don't just happen at Earth's surface but at varying depths. Specific skills practiced are plotting latitude & longitude coordinates on a map, plotting longitude vs depth on a graph, and visualizing the same data from multiple perspectives. This is real earthquake data from actual earthquakes in South America.

This printout of some NASA news article headings gives teachers the chance to discuss the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which happened because one contracted company built part of the computer to think in metric units and another built a different part to think in imperial units. That's $193 million wasted because people didn't carefully label their units! The back of the printout has the SI unit prefixes, so this can be an introduction to them, and how metric conversion is so much simpler