Including missing topics that students suggest
I’ve been talking about the importance of leaving room for topics that students are really interested in for a long time. Today, I want to tell you about my first…
Tag: GEOF130
Need your help! “Wish list” for a student lab for tank experiments?
I’d love your input: If your student lab for GFD tank experiments had to downsize, but you had to present a “wish list” for a smaller replacement, what would be…
Fictitious forces (3/5): Coriolis force — how we think it should be taught
So how do we teach about the Coriolis force? The following is a shortened version of an article that Pierre de Wet and I wrote when I was still in…
Concept maps II
A couple of pointers on how to use concept maps in class. I recently presented concept maps as a tool both here and in a workshop I co-taught. And I …
Concept maps
Drawing concept maps at the beginning, the middle and the end of the course. Using concept maps in teaching is something that I first tried last year in both the…
Oceanographic concepts and language (part 3)
What level of proficiency do you need to communicate about science? This post is not strictly about oceanography, but I started thinking about it in the context of a class…
Oceanographic concepts and language (part 2)
How to make lectures in a foreign language less scary for the students. The class that I have until recently taught in Bergen, GEOF130, is taken by students in oceanography…
Student cruises (part 5 of many, or – thank you to a great mentor)
The first student cruise I ever taught while being taught by one of the greatest teachers myself. As you might have noticed from the last four or so blog posts,…
Student cruises (part 4 of many – weird profiles)
When a CTD profile suddenly looks really weird. As mentioned before, student cruises seem to bring out the weird experiences with CTDs. My theory is that it’s the world testing…
Student cruise (part 3 of many, or – when the CTD didn’t start up)
When a CTD just doesn’t start pumping. In this post, I talked about how student cruises always happen to be on the perfect days, and then in this post I talked…
Student cruising
Why student cruises always end up being on the most beautiful days of the year, or: why student cruises are an important part of the education. Remember the picture I…
Oceanographic concepts and language (part 1)
About teaching in a language that is a foreign language for both your students and yourself. Most of my teaching so far has happened in English to mainly non-native English…
Water not in solid body rotation yet
Confusing students even more by discussing how momentum is being transferred from the tank to the water. As you remember, we are preparing for the Ekman experiment and need to…
Water in solid body rotation.
Spinning up a tank until all water particles move with the same angular velocity. Before running the Ekman spiral experiment, the tank needs to be spun up to solid body…
Ekman spiral in a tank.
Tank experiment showing (the effects of) the Ekman spiral. One experiments that has been run in GEOF130 forever is the “Ekman spiral” experiment. A tank filled with water is spun…
Ship-generated internal waves
A tank experiment showing ship-generated internal waves. When entering a fjord from the open ocean by ship, it can sometimes be noted that the speed of the ship changes even…
Velocity of shallow water waves.
The experiment we run to discuss the velocity of shallow water waves. In this post, I discussed how it took us several years to modify an experiment to make it…
Seesawing of standing waves.
Improving one of the experiments run in the GEOF130 lab. One experiment that has been run in GEOF130 forever is the “standing wave”, where a wave is excited in a…
How sound is refracted towards the regions of minimum speed.
Students acting out the process of sound being refracted towards the region of minimum speed. We’ve been talking about refraction lately. Waves get bent in the direction of lower velocity.…
Water seeks its level.
A solution for the siphon problem of the fjord circulation experiment. After having run the fjord circulation experiments for several years in a row with several groups of students each…
Fjord circulation
Tank experiment on a typical circulation in a fjord. Traditionally, a fjord circulation experiment has been done in GEOF130’s student practicals. Pierre and I recently met up to test-run the…
Standing waves.
A seesaw to visualize how standing waves move in an enclosed basin. In enclosed basins, standing waves can occur. In the simplest case, they have a node in the middle…
Progressive waves on a rope
Visualization of progressive waves: wave form and energy move forward while the rope itself stays in place. When I talked about waves in GEOF130 recently, in order to explain the…
How a CTD works
Movie on how the most important instrument in oceanography works. On our cruise on the WHOI research vessel Knorr in 2011, Sindre Skrede (find him on twitter or vimeo for many more…
Internal waves in the atmosphere
A photo of internal waves in the atmosphere. Internal waves exist on the interface between fluids of different densities. In the ocean they are mostly observed through their surface imprint.…
Details of lee waves in the tank.
A movie focusing on details of the lee waves in the tank. In this post, we investigated lee waves in a tank in a general way. Here, I want to…
Surface imprints of internal waves
How internal waves in the ocean can be spotted on the surface. Under certain conditions, internal waves in the ocean can be spotted at the ocean’s surface due to changes…
Internal (lee) waves in a tank.
Lee wave experiment in a large tank with a moving mountain. In this previous post, we talked about internal waves in a very simple experiment. But Geophysical Institute has a great…
Internal waves in a bottle
Internal waves are shown in simple 0.5l bottles. Waves travel on the interface between fluids of different densities and the phase speed of those waves depends on the density difference…
How mountains form
A very simple visualization of rock folding. See? When I said “very simple” I meant “very simple”. But it does help explain why sometimes rock layers are not nice and…
Ice in the ocean – my historical photos
Ice formation in the ocean – using my own photos to tell the story. Recently I talked about using my own photo to explain the generation of wind-generated waves to…
A fetching title for a fetching photo post
Using a photo from one of my research cruises to explain the formation of wind waves. Wind waves are (surprise coming up!) waves generated by wind that blows over the…
A simple DIY tidal model
Instruction for a very simple DIY tidal model. Today, we built a very simple DIY tidal model in class. It consists of two sets of tidal bulges: One locked in…
On the structure of fresh water and salt water ice
More details on the structure of fresh water and salt water ice. Fresh water and salt water ice have very different structures as I already discussed in this post. In the…
Introducing voting cards (post 3/3)
How do you introduce voting cards as a new method in a way that minimizes student resistance? As all new methods, voting cards (see post on the method here, and…
Melting ice cubes – one experiment, many ways (post 3/4)
Different didactical settings in which the “ice cubes melting in fresh and salt water” experiment can be used. In part 1 and 2 of this series, I showed two different…
How much salt is there in sea water?
Visualization of how much salt is actually contained in sea water. When preparing “sea water samples” for class, it is always astonishing to me how much salt I have to…
Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water (post 2/4)
The “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment the way I usually use it in class. — Edit — For an updated description of this experiment please…
How to pose questions for voting card concept tests (post 2/3)
Different ways of posing questions for concept tests are being presented here Concept tests using voting cards have been presented in this post. Here, I want to talk about different…
A, B, C or D?
Voting cards. A low-tech concept test tool, enhancing student engagement and participation. (Post 1/3) Voting cards are a tool that I learned about from Al Trujillo at the workshop “teaching…
Sea surface height and ocean depth
A hands-on activity in which students use real data to find similarities in the sea surface height and the ocean depth along satellite tracks. In yesterday’s GEOF130 class, we explored…
Heat capacity of air and water
Hands-on activity to better understand the concept and consequences of heat capacity. Also a great party trick. Imagine you take a balloon. Any kind of normal balloon. You blow it…
And even more on density
My favorite experiment. Quick and easy and very impressive way to illustrate the influence of temperature on water densities. Today in the “introduction to oceanography” (GEOF130) we conducted my favorite…
More on density
Extremely simple experiment to illustrate the effect of density differences. At room temperature, will coke cans float or sink in freshwater? And how about coke light? Btw, this experiment is…
How to measure temperature, salinity and density
Three in-class experiments run in parallel. Great if you want to discuss how properties are measured and what kind of difficulties you might encounter. Temperature, salinity and density are the…
Tasting sea water
Hands-on activity on sea water salinity In the first lecture of the “introduction to oceanography” GEOF130 course 2013, we investigated water samples from four different regions: The Mediterranean, the tropical…