9th grade
Activities:
- Trace Earth’s ancient history with an animated timeline
- Explore the Miller-Urey experiment and its groundbreaking results
- Examine the challenges scientists faced in recreating life’s building blocks
- Investigate four key hypotheses about the origin of life
- Place major events in order on an interactive timeline—from the Big Bang to humans
- Reflect on a thought-provoking question: how does evolution create complexity in a universe where entropy increases?
Activities:
- Explore an illustrated timeline of life on Earth, from early microbes to modern humans
- Identify organisms that lived in specific periods by searching an interactive panorama
- Examine fossil images and match them to accurate reconstructions
- Illustrate a chosen geological epoch in a creative drawing task
- Discover how and where fossils are found in the real world, including practical paleontology tips
Activities:
- Discover how local ecosystems connect to a global biosphere
- Explore life in extreme environments like deep-sea hydrothermal vents
- Reflect on the ambitious goals and outcomes of the Biosphere 2 experiment
- Investigate the meaning of noosphere and cacosphere, and where humanity might be headed
- Conclude with a reflective quiz that ties together science and critical thinking
Activities:
- Explore the microbes living on human skin and distinguish between permanent and temporary inhabitants
- Read about and investigate the diverse microflora of the mouth, scrolling through an extended explanatory text
- Examine the bacteria of the large intestine and compare them with oral and skin communities
- Complete an interactive sorting task: drag and drop the labels of different microorganisms (including bacteria and Candida) to their correct positions, gaining or losing points depending on accuracy
- Perform a habitat-matching task by placing each microorganism where it belongs—mouth, large intestine, or skin
- Try a hands-on activity: prepare a slide of dental plaque, stain it with the Gram method, and observe it under a microscope
Activities:
- Sort different algae into major groups
- Explore how cyanobacteria are sometimes included among “algae” as photosynthetic prokaryotes
- Place algae into their diverse habitats—from rivers, lakes, and oceans to sloth fur, sea anemone tentacles, and even mountain snow
- Practice identifying algae with a teaching key based on real specimens used in lab work