Data Puzzles Puzzle Pieces
“Puzzle Pieces” include many of the ingredients in our more polished Data Puzzle lessons but in a format that offers teachers and their students space to play with and explore a larger dataset! Bring Puzzle Pieces into your classroom by connecting them to a Data Puzzle lesson or in a structure of your choice!
Included in a Puzzle Piece is an embedded way to play with and explore the dataset, as well as context about the data and scientists who collected the data! Click the circles on the timeline bar to jump between sections or scroll through at your leisure. Enjoy!
Poor air quality in Denver, CO experienced by some racial and socioeconomic groups more than others
Communities of color breathe Denver's worst air, that's the finding in a new paper published by atmospheric chemist Alex Bradley. To come to this conclusion, Alex and his colleagues determined the concentration two pollutants: nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter (NO2 and PM2.5) across the city of Denver and used 2020 census tracts to find a correlation between pollution and race. Explore these data and learn more about past discriminatory lending practices, known as redlining, that are linked to inequities in air quality today.
Snow conditions in the Colorado Rocky Mountains (1975-2022)
The Colorado River is fed largely by snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains. Therefore, to understand how much water could be in the Colorado River each year, we need to understand things like how much snow fell that year and when the snow melted (releasing water into the river). For more than forty years, billy barr, has measured total snowfall and the date of snowmelt from a set location in the East River Watershed in the Rocky Mountains. Explore billy's long-term snow datasets alongside seasonal temperature datasets to learn more about the climate factors impacting snow in the East River Watershed and reflect on what it might mean for the 40+ million downstream Colorado River water users.
Amplified Warming in a Changing Arctic (2000-2021)
The Arctic is warming up to 4x faster than the rest of the world. Scientists like Dr. Jen Kay are racing to learn more about the factors causing the Arctic’s amplified warming. Fieldwork in the Arctic is extremely difficult because the Arctic is so remote and environmental conditions are so harsh. Instead, Dr. Kay relies on datasets collected from instruments attached to satellites. Explore these datasets: temperature (global and Arctic), Arctic sea ice extent, and Arctic albedo, to learn more about the changing Arctic climate system!