Matthew M Steele

​The Food Web Game

This lesson, available here, is an Inquiry based investigation where student trace the movement of energy and biomass through the food web.  Over the course of the lesson students create there own unique food web.  Individual food webs can then be added to form a larger class web.  The lesson allows a deep study of Producers, Consumers, and Decomposers, and there relative abundances in an ecosystem. The lesson is targeted to upper elementary and middle school students, but could easily be extended upward with more advanced analysis of the data generated by the lesson.

This lesson was developed in association with Chip Harms of Kenwood Elementary in Bowling Green, OH under support from the BGSU PRISM Program.  It is released here under a Creative Commons licence.​

Erosion on Mars

In this Inquiry based exploration students construct an artificial Martian surface and investigate the patterns left behind by various types of mechanical erosion.  The data the students collect during the experimental portion of the lab is then used to identify erosion features in real images of the Mars collected by NASA spacecraft. The lesson is targeted to upper elementary and middle school students, and is a great self contained lesson that works well in outreach and enrichment environments.

​This lesson was developed in association with Chip Harms of Kenwood Elementary in Bowling Green, OH under support from the BGSU PRISM Program.  It is released here under a Creative Commons licence.​

Doppler Shift Animations

​The following are quick animations I constructed to illustrate the Doppler shift of light. There are certainly a great number of extant animations that illustrate velocity shifts quite well, but I wanted one that would simultaneously show the frequency of light as it appears in both the rest frame and the observed frame and so had to make my own.  These are non-relativistic illustrations, and consequently don't stand up to rigorous inspection, but I find them helpful simple depiction of Doppler shift.

The earth model used in these animations was constructed by ​Porphyry. The video files are in ogg theora format and are released under a Creative Commons licence.