Add Augmented Reality to your Earth Day Lessons with Merge EDU

Designed to bring interactive, hands-on learning to students using augmented reality (AR) technology, Merge EDU offers countless opportunities to explore, learn, and further develop their understanding of our beautiful planet. 

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."
- Albert Einstein

With the Merge Cube, students can physically rotate and examine 3D models of the Earth, its layers, ecosystems, and more. Let's take a look at some of the ways your science class can use Merge EDU to learn more about the earth.

Celebrating Earth Day with Capstone, Shannon McClintock-Miller and Merge EDU (plus your Chance to Win an Earth Day Prize!)

Earth Day is celebrated around the world on April 22nd every year and serves as an important reminder that we should conserve Earth’s precious resources.

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Earth from the Inside

With Merge EDU you can explore geological structures like tectonic plates, layers of the earth, volcanoes, fossils, and rock formations to learn about earth’s physical structure and processes.

Geology

Explore geological structures like tectonic plates, layers of the earth, volcanoes, fossils, and rock formations to learn about earth’s physical structure and processes.

Object Viewer for MERGE Cube

Terraforming Earth

Welcome to Terraforming Earth! In this card we’ll look at different aspects of the “anatomy” of the Earth, and how some processes create things like volcanoes and earthquakes! We’ll take you on a trip from the Crust to the Core and back out again. Hang on!

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Rock History of Earth

Earth’s history is written in its rocks. When we look at a canyon like the Grand Canyon, we see almost two billion years of Earth’s past revealed in its rock layers. We also see how over millions of years, water can change the rocky landscape. And when we dig deep into each of the rocky layers, we find fossils – traces of living things that existed on Earth long ago. In these activities, we will explore how water carves out rock, how rock layers slowly accumulate, and what we can learn from the rock layers and fossils found in them.

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Ecosystems, Water and Land

Students can also learn about how living and nonliving components of an ecosystem plays a part in keeping the entire system functional and healthy; the stages of the water cycle and how it continually cycles around land, ocean and atmosphere; and visualize the various layers of the atmosphere.

Layers of the Atmosphere

Earth’s atmosphere is a layer of gases that surround the planet, all held in place by Earth’s gravity. We call it air, but its density changes as you get farther and farther from Earth. Use this module to visualize the different altitudes of the atmosphere and how we label them.

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The Water Cycle

Water continually cycles around land, the ocean, and in the atmosphere via evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. View this interactive water cycle to visualize these effects!

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Island Diversity

An ecosystem is a community of different organisms together with the environment they live in. Each living and non-living component of an ecosystem plays a part in keeping the entire system functional and healthy. In these activities, you will look at an island ecosystem and try to understand how all the components fit together. You will go from observing life on the island, to trying to change some of the environmental conditions, to building your own island ecosystem from scratch!

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Earth: Realtime Earth Data

This is the latest image of the Earth available in true color. The imagery is from the Soumi NPP satellite. NPP is the National Polar-orbiting Partnership between NASA and NOAA.

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Vegetation

Satellites observe global-scale patterns of vegetation that scientists use to study changes in plant growth as a result of climate and environmental changes as well as human activity. Photosynthesis plays a big role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in wood and soils, so mapping vegetation is a key part of studying the carbon cycle. Farmers and resource managers also use satellite-based vegetation maps to help them monitor the health of forests and croplands.

Merge HoloGlobe

Renewable Resources

In addition to learning about the Earth and its processes on Earth Day, students can also take a look at various types of renewable energy which allows us to produce energy with very little waste or actual resource cost. The sun is important for this, but so are things like wind and water which also produce energy we can store and transport.

Solar Energy

Solar energy is radiant heat and light from the sun that we convert into storable and usable energy. This module shows an example of active solar, where we use photovoltaic systems to convert the sunlight to energy.

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Wind Energy

Wind energy is generated when the wind blows and turns a small motor attached to a large turbine. When the windmill rotates, the blades capture the kinetic energy of the wind and turn it into mechanical energy.

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Hydroelectric Energy

In this module, we see how a dam can produce energy by using the water flow to turn a generator. Hydroelectricity actually accounts for about 70% of all renewable energy around the world!

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Not only will Merge EDU energize your Earth Day 2024 lesson plans, they'll foster an immersive, engaging, and dynamic learning environment where students can truly connect with our Earth's complex systems in a meaningful way. Happy Earth Day!!