This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.

A kinesthetic activity that challenges students to participate in a model that describes the fate of solar energy as it enters the Earth system.  A good initial lesson for Earth’s energy budget, students unravel the benefits and limitations of their model.

Students will practice the process of making claims, collecting evidence to support claims, and applying scientific reasoning to connect evidence to claims.

Dr. Wickland works at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where she oversees the planning and implementation of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program and leads its Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area. She coordinates research programs in land cover and land use change, ocean biogeochemistry, terrestrial ecology, and biodiversity. 

Students use Phytopia: Exploration of the Marine Ecosystem, a computer-based tool, to investigate various phytoplankton species and topics relating to phytoplankton biology. 

In this lesson, students investigate and identify various phytoplankton using images that were previously taken with a compound microscope.  Credit:  This lesson is modified from a lesson of the same name created by The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education&nbsp

This lesson contains a card sort activity that challenges students to predict relative albedo values of common surfaces. 

Space weather refers to the conditions of the space environment driven by the Sun and its impacts on objects in the solar system. Though it is almost 100 million miles away from Earth, the Sun influences our daily lives in ways you may not realize. 

Explore and connect to GLOBE protocol bundles. Each bundle has related Earth System Data Explorer datasets identified.

Guided by the 5E model, this lesson allows students to work together to uncover how changes in sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are connected to Earth’s energy budget.