Wooster Geology Majors Help with B-WISER

The College’s of Wooster’s B-WISER (Buckeye Women In Science, Engineering, and Research) program for 7th and 8th grade girls descended upon Scovel Hall last week for some fun activities in geology. In an afternoon session with the campers, we divided them into several groups so that they could get more individualized attention as they moved from station to station. One station, which was taught by geology major Lindsey Bowman (’12), allowed the campers to look at a variety of minerals and igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. The focus of the station, though, was a fossil exercise in which campers tried to identify invertebrate fossils from large Ordovician rock slabs that the Mark Wilson has collected over the years. These slabs primarily contained brachiopods, bryozoans, rugose corals, bivalves, and trilobite fragments. In the image below, Lindsey (far left, blue shirt) is helping the campers identify Ordovician fossils.

The other station involved recreating a dinosaur trackway from Texas. The dinosaur tracks, as well as the stride distances between footprints, were to scale. B-WISER campers were tasked with figuring out which dinosaur was moving faster (bipedal or quadrupedal) and then coming up with a hypothesis of dinosaur behavior at the time the trackway was made. With help from William Cary (’13) and myself, campers navigated the measuring and math required to complete the task. Below is an image of the trackway in Scovel Hall; the campers are busy calculating the footprint length and stride length, while William (green shirt) is in the background helping with the activity.

At the end of the afternoon, all B-WISER campers came together for a final activity involving Plate Tectonics. Campers participated in a JIGSAW exercise created by Dale Sawyer (Rice University) in which they are divided into speciality teams: geography, seismology, volcanology, and geochronology. After analyzing data from only their specialty, mixed groups are formed so that there is at least one person from each speciality. Campers then put all of the data sets together to determine the position of the major plate boundaries on Earth. The B-WISER campers appeared to have a great time throughout the week, and geology sure enjoyed their visit!!