Math-Sci-Guy

This is a simple, interdisciplinary worksheet for science or math students. It walks students through the steps of figuring out how many times bigger the sun is compared to the earth (by diameter, and then by volume). The first page of the document is the worksheet; the second page is the answer key. Primarily written for an Earth Science or Astronomy class, but can be useful in a Math class, too. The math involves substituting numbers into an equation and simplifying (cubing, multiplication,

This activity guides students in studying how spherical the earth is. I would use this after students have already learned the term "oblate sphereoid," so that you can then use this to discuss with them How oblate is it? Students will do some simple calculations (basic ratios) to discover the relief that the highest and lowest elevations on Earth would have if the earth were shrunk down to the size of a (32cm diameter) classroom globe.

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