TAKING RESEARCH ON THE ROAD: THE CLASSROOM DAM REMOVAL STORY

The Science Museum of Minnesota's Earthscapes Education program provides K-12 students, teachers and the public opportunities to explore data and concepts from National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) research. NCED is an NSF funded Science and Technology Center devoted to interdisciplinary understanding of the ecological and physical processes that define and shape rivers and river networks. The Earthscapes programs include an outdoor science park, field-based summer teacher institutes and a traveling “school residency” program. This session will present classroom activities developed for the residency, in which students explore physical and social issues involved in a real dam-removal case study. Participants will have a chance to experiment with the classroom-scale dam-removal models developed by NCED researchers and Science Museum educators and to try out some of the classroom data collection activities developed to date.