Active Learning Activities

Group Work Project Contracting

For instructors planning student group work projects over many weeks or months.

Running on Water: Activating Prior Knowledge of Static Equilibrium

Students watch, discuss, then analyze the veracity of a video in which hydrophobic shoes allow people to run on water.

Silent Discussion

Conduct a discussion in your class without students ever speaking a word!

Reimagining the Reading Quiz: Peer Instruction in English

Students do a reading quiz in class and revise their answers after developing and sharing a rationale for their choice.

Mechanics in Motion: Iterative GIF Creation

In groups, students create GIFs to demonstrate and explain how mechanic principles apply in real-life scenarios.

Nature of Science Ice-Breaker

A first class ice-breaker activity introducing the nature of science.

Love at First Insight: Crafting Dating Profiles for Therapeutic Techniques

Students create a dating profile that highlights the key feature of the major Abnormality Models in Psychology.

Card Sorting Activities for Mechanics

Physics Worksheet Based Activity

The aim of the activity is the application of concepts and math to solve complex problems.

Connotation Exercise: Interview and Presentation

This activity introduces basic concepts of literary analysis and interpretation.

Who are We? Class Demographics

In this icebreaker activity, students answer questions about themselves, which is included in a anonymous class profile.

Group Problem Solving with Show and Tell

Students learn to build a conceptual model describing a Mechanics-based situation and practice mathematical problem-solving.

Model Building

Students learn to build a conceptual model describing a situation involving an accelerating charged particle.

Circuits: Card Sorting With Multiple Representations (E&M)

Students develop their ability to reason about physics concepts in terms of multiple representations, beyond just equations.

Electrostatics: Card Sorting With Mutiple Representations (E&M)

Students associate configurations of charges with their characteristics from word, diagram & graph representations.

Dictation: Read and Run

Activité sur les Homophones

Students pick a homophone out of a hat and are asked to first analyze and prepare a short 2 minute teaching lesson.

Family HiStories of Migration

Students interview two members of their family to collect information about their family history and present it in class.

Reflective Reading on Islam

Students use homework questions to prompt a deeper engagement with the reading material to generate better class discussion.

Forget the Math! Draw Pictures to Learn the Wave Theory of Light

Poetic Literary Jeopardy

Students learn literary and poetic elements that will be part of their fundamental 'toolbox' for the rest of the course.

Bottle Rocket Tracker

Using video and Tracker software, students learn to analyze and fit equations of motion to raw data.

Dart Gun Velocity

In this activity, students will find the muzzle velocity of a foam dart gun and predict its maximum range.

Circus Launch Clicker Questions