GLOBE Learning Activities

Students use color visualizations and a 3-D paper model of the Earth to explore the causes of seasons, with a focus on Earth's tilt and its spherical shape.

Students use visualizations to compare the effects of incoming solar energy in the two hemispheres, furthering their understanding of seasonal change and climatic effects of land and water.

Students collect, describe and compare soils from their own backyards.

Students simulate environmental conditions in order to determine the key factors that affect the decomposition of organic material in soil.

Students explore soil moisture by weighing and drying sponges and then they explore their soil samples in the same way.

Students explore how the placement and design of instrument shelters can influence temperature measurements taken from thermometers located inside them.

Take a Tree Height observation, and then send NASA a screenshot of your observation's latitude and longitude. You will receive data from NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission that gives you the amount of precipitation that fell for the location of your observation. Then you can use this data and tell a story about your tree- and this will become part of a global virtual project. This is a great opportunity for IVSS investigations!

Have you ever experienced flooding or drought in your location? Do you wonder how climate change might affect sea-level where you live? Join this project and learn about how water impacts people's lives around the world. NASA has an international satellite mission- Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission that is able to measure how much precipitation falls from the clouds to the ground- all around the world! This data is updated every 30 minutes, and we now have a 23 year record of precipitation. In this activity, you will take a GLOBE cloud observation, and then send a screenshot of your data to NASA's GPM Outreach coordinator. She will send you the past 23 years of precipitation data- yearly, seasonally, and monthly- along with questions you can use to analyze this data for your location. If you write a paragraph or two, she will add your story to this international project that is hosted on NASA's GPM website.

Students correlate graphs of vegetation vigor with those of temperature and precipitation data for four diverse ecosystems to determine which climatic factor is limiting growth.

Teams of students play a game in which they gather data and distort the values of certain measurements. They then estimate the values of the measurements taken by other teams and try to detect their errors.