360Storylines—Forest Fires, 1-Year Access

Product Details

A 360Storyline is a collection of experiments that together let students engage in science in an authentic manner through the use of relevant phenomena. Each experiment in a 360Storyline builds on things learned in the preceding experiments until students develop a final, working explanation or model of the phenomenon. Every lab in any 360Storyline is completely editable and supported by videos and simulations. 

Includes:

• Access to digital content for 1 year
• Lab supplies for each experiment for a single class of 30 students

Forest Fires
Lead students to a written understanding/working model of forest fires. Forest fires are examples of fuel sources undergoing exothermic reactions, such as hydrocarbons reacting with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce water vapor and carbon dioxide. The process releases significant amounts of energy because the energy needed to break the bonds in the fuels is smaller than the energy released by the formation of the products: carbon dioxide and water. For a fire to burn, there must be heat, fuel and oxygen. A forest provides a large amount of fuel in the form of trees densely packed together. The energy given off by a single tree can serve as the activation energy that causes an adjacent tree to burn and so on.

What Students Do

Lab 1—Energy Densities of Organic Fuels
Students use calorimetry to determine the amount of energy (on a per gram basis) in multiple fuel sources including wood and ethanol.

Lab 2—Matter Transformation in Combustion
Students combust organic compounds, including sucrose and dextrose, in a closed system.

Lab 3—Measure Energy Flow in Chemical Reactions
Students react calcium oxide with water and barium hydroxide with ammonium thiocyanate. Students carry out each reaction multiple times, varying the masses of starting materials across trials.

Lab 4—Climate Change and the Carbon Cycle
Students create mixtures that contain plant life, water and acid–base indicators. They expose the mixtures to light or darkness.

About 360Storylines

A 360Storyline is a collection of experiments that together let students engage in science in an authentic manner through the use of relevant phenomena. Each experiment in a 360Storyline builds on things learned in the preceding experiments until students develop a final, working explanation or model of the phenomenon. Every lab in any 360Storyline is completely editable and supported by videos and simulations. 

Students must drive the learning forward by developing procedures and asking questions. Each storyline is supported by editable documents that force students to think about how the data they collect relate to an individual experiment’s investigative phenomenon and how the data they collect in a series of labs relate to a broader, anchoring phenomenon.