Earth Math: A Brief Mathematical Guide to Earth Science and Climate Change

Teachers continue to look for ways to make math meaningful by providing students with problems and examples demonstrating its applications in everyday life. Earth Math offers math applications through strong motivation of discovery. Technology makes it possible for students to experience the value of math, instead of just reading about it. Technology is essential to mathematics and science for such purposes as “access to remote locations, sample collection and treatment, measurement, data collection and storage, computation, and communication of information.” This book is designed to be used as a supplement for teaching mathematical topics. The problems can be used to enhance understanding of the mathematical concept, or as a good assessment of student mastery. This collection of activities is based on a weekly series of space science problems distributed to thousands of teachers during the 2009-2010 school year. They were intended for students looking for additional challenges in the math and physical science curriculum in grades 9 through 12. The problems were created to be authentic glimpses of modern science and engineering issues, often involving actual research data. The problems were designed to be ‘one-pagers’ with a Teacher’s Guide and Answer Key as a second page. This compact form was deemed very popular by participating teachers.