Activity

Hands-on experiments, debates, data dives, and diagramming and design exercises put students at the center of their learning.

Artificial Intelligence

Debate your AI use

In this activity, students will consider the use of AI in the science classroom. Students will gather information to prepare for a student-moderated debate on whether AI should be used as a tool in the science research process. During the debate, students will collaborate with their peers to formulate their arguments and rebuttals. After the debate’s conclusion, students will work together to determine a policy for ethical use of AI in the science classroom.

By Science News Learning

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More Stories in Activity

  1. Tech

    Features of future technology

    Scientists and engineers are hard at work developing new technologies that will impact everyday life. Students will focus on one future piece of technology and consider the science behind it before brainstorming ways to use it to solve a problem or design an experiment.

    By Science News Learning
  2. Ecosystems

    Ancient ecosystem clues

    Students will describe what they can learn from different types of fossils, from bones to microfossils. Then they will learn about an example of fossilized vomit and answer questions about how paleontologists use fossilized “clues” to learn about ancient species’ interactions and ecosystems.

    By Science News Learning
  3. Earth

    With patience comes great data

    In this activity, students will explore long-running research experiments that outlive their scientists, highlighted in a Science News Explores article, while reviewing essential concepts of the scientific method. They will then think about which scientific phenomena lend themselves to longer-term explorations before brainstorming ideas that could lay the foundation for a class research project.

    By Science News Learning
  4. Physics

    Hole in none

    In this activity, students will share their prior knowledge about golf before reading the Science News article “There’s math behind this maddening golf mishap.” Students will then define key terms identified in the article before playing golf in person or digitally and observing how each property or force influences the ball’s movement. At the end of the activity, students will use their knowledge of physics and their observations to describe the “lip out” phenomenon.

    By Science News Learning
  5. Life

    One parent or two? Sexual vs. asexual reproduction

    In this lesson, students will compare asexual and sexual reproduction while analyzing the rate that offspring are created. Then, they’ll explore how the elm zigzag sawfly is spreading across North America, the threat this poses, why this case is different from other insect invasions and what concerned citizens can do.

    By Science News Learning
  6. Space

    The Eras Tour of the Universe

    Students will explore the cosmic timeline of the universe’s evolution era by era, from the Big Bang until today. Students will present about one of the eras using a visual aid they created to help communicate what happened during the era and the physics behind it.

    By Science News Learning
  7. Health & Medicine

    Needle-free insulin

    Students will investigate how researchers apply chemistry principles to create a potential solution to help diabetes patients. Students will define the problem of why it’s difficult to create skin patches to deliver diabetes drugs and brainstorm possible solutions by thinking about the structure and function of the different layers of the epidermis.

    By Science News Learning
  8. Health & Medicine

    Exercise and education

    In this activity, students will design an experiment to observe how exercise affects their ability to concentrate in class. Students will then read the Science News Explores article “Short exercise workouts can boost classroom performance” and analyze how their experiment differed from the experiment described in the article.

    By Science News Learning
  9. Animals

    Puzzling problems

    In a research study about group coordination and cooperation, researchers tasked both humans and ants to solve the same sort of puzzle individually and in groups. Students will describe what they learn about the study’s experimental design, first after watching videos of the ant trials, then after watching videos of the human trials, and finally after reading a comic that summarizes the research study.

    By Science News Learning