Landslide Lab lesson plans
Each one is a class period with everything to run it: a teacher plan, a student worksheet, an exit ticket with answers, and the standards it meets. Students need no account, and a free class saves their work.
Landslide Lab: Why Did the Hill Let Go?
Students rain on a forested hill above a road and houses, and watch the water rise in the soil in a side cut. The big storm leaves the hollow barely holding. They clear its trees and the same storm brings it down, then try cutting the road deeper instead, and explain each result as the pull of the weight against the grip.
FreeLandslide Lab: How Steep Can It Stand?
The tilt tray is the classroom slope stability lab. Students raise a tray of sand until the first grains roll and then all of it lets go, dry, damp and soaked, and record both angles. Damp sand stands steeper than dry and soaked sand flows at about 19 degrees. They test other materials, change one thing at a time, and use the data to say which slopes need the most care in a storm.
FreeLandslide Lab: Reading the Snowpack
Students play a winter one day at a time and read the layers in a snow pit after each. Clear nights grow frost feathers on top of the snow, and heavy snow buries them. On day four nothing slides on its own, yet a skier crossing the bowl breaks the buried frost and sets off a slab. Students name the four things a slab avalanche needs, then build winters of their own to test them.
FreeLandslide Lab: Forecast Tomorrow
Students act as forecasters. With only three checks, they dig snow pits on a mountain they have not seen, rate the danger in three bands, name the problem and pick a route, then publish. Tomorrow plays and the app names the pit that showed the danger or the one they missed. Then they forecast a storm on a hillside, choose which houses to warn, and weigh a missed house against a false alarm.