Want to create an environment where students see themselves as scientists and create independent capable scientific researchers, while exploring real-world scientific problems AND maintain your commitment to rigor? The bioplastics investigation and other projects shared here might be your answer.

TAKEAWAYS:
It is possible to increase student engagement with project-based chemistry explorations while still maintaining content and rigor. Tackling real-world chemistry problems can create a model environment for students and faculty to learn alongside one another while fostering key 21st-century skills.

SPEAKERS:
Hannah Sullivan

Explore an extreme heat based phenomenon with the Understanding Global Change (UGC) framework’s modeling practices. Learn UGC practices and tools to help incorporate an Earth systems perspective into your curriculum and adapt existing resources.

TAKEAWAYS:
Experience the nature and processes of science by constructing explanations about a global change phenomenon with the Understanding Global Change framework and explanatory modeling practices.

SPEAKERS:
Alec Barron

Attendees will participate in several activities designed to make atomic scale ideas visible and understandable. We will be looking at the Rutherford Gold Foil Experiment, the meaning of Schrodinger probability plots, and covalent bonding.

TAKEAWAYS:
Students learn best by doing and experiencing. This workshop will present new ways to help students experience atomic scale chemistry in a way that they can touch and make sense of.

SPEAKERS:
Larry McAfoos

In this workshop teachers will get a hands-on experience using Harvard's Project Zero Thinking Routines, which are routines designed to guide students as they explore and organize their thoughts about a new topic. Teachers will leave with routines and activities they can start implementing ASAP!

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will gain familiarity with and learn how to embed Harvard's Project Zero Thinking Routines into their curriculum, which help them to successfully have all students explore and organize their thoughts around a topic while participating in academic lessons.

SPEAKERS:
Dani Maloney

Explore how students can change a metal’s properties through alloying, heat-treating, and/or cold-working. Classroom activities that will enhance chemistry understanding of atomic structure and real world engineering relevance. Deepen understanding of binary phase diagrams.

TAKEAWAYS:
How do architects and manufacturers manipulate common metal properties to get the metals to behave in the desired way for a specific use? Participants will make a simple low-melt tin-based alloy and explore a binary phase diagram. Heat-treating of steel and cold-working of copper is also explored.

SPEAKERS:
Scott Spohler

Participants will experience a lesson designed to use argument from evidence to learn about how the structure and function of natural and designed macromolecules differs. Briefly learn how technology-mediated lesson study has helped rural science teachers collaborate to design 3 dimensional lessons.

TAKEAWAYS:
In one class period, students will make a claim from initial evidence and then revise that claim as they gather evidence through five different tests used to teach them about the structure and function of cotton and spandex.

SPEAKERS:
Rebecca Sansom, Douglas Morris