Escape...ology

The Story: Welcome to FAMS! As a new 6th grader, it can sometimes be difficult to remember where specific places are in new setting. In an effort to help you to navigate your new surroundings, and to get you to problem-solve, you will participate in a FAMS scavenger hunt.

The Challenge: You will be given a series of challenges, clues, and riddles all related to popular areas in FAMS. Can you put all the pieces together to find your way around FAMS? Can you “unlock” the final mystery in Science? Use all the clues, problem solve, and work cooperatively as a team.

Guidelines: You will work as a class to complete this brain-busting, problem-solving adventure. However, you will be assigned to small groups to complete each of the tasks. Once one task is completed, you will receive your next task. The team that can solve the problems the quickest will be rewarded.

Tips and Hints: Think outside of the box (literally). Use your schedules and classrooms to help navigate the school.

The Story: Alfred Wegener. World traveler. Problem solver. Scientist extraordinaire. Wegener stared at a map of the world, and he observed something interesting. He noticed that the continents looked like they could fit together, as in a giant puzzle. When he put this idea to the test, he saw they in fact did fit together. Wegener called this “super continent” Pangaea. Could this just be a coincidence, or could this have once been Earth’s reality? Wegener decided to find out.

Wegener knew he needed evidence to support his claim that all of the continents had been joined together long ago, but since drifted apart. He started his scientific expedition in his home country of Germany. Wegener traveled to South Africa, and found fossils of prehistoric creatures that matched with fossils found in the southern tip of South America. Looking at the fossils, it is not likely that this creature would have been able to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. However, South Africa and the southern tip of South America would have lined up perfectly if Pangaea once existed, which would have allowed this creature to easily travel across land.

Next, Wegener traveled to North America. In the northern part of Canada, he found coal fields that matched with coal fields in northern Europe. Coal is formed when plant die, and get compressed together over many thousands of years. Since the coal was the same in Canada and Europe, the plants that created the coal must have been the same. These locations in North America and Europe would have lined up if Pangaea once existed, which would make sense why the coal was the same in both places.

Finally, Wegener ventured to the very cold Arctic Island of Spitsbergen. Here he found fossil evidence of tropical plants, which can only exist in tropical locations nearest the equator. For this plant to have lived many, many years ago in what is now the Arctic, this means Iceland must have had a warmer, tropical climate. This is not possible given Spitsbergen’s current location close to the Arctic Circle. However, if Wegener was correct and Pangaea once existed, Spitsbergen would have been located closer to Earth’s Equator.

The Challenge: The classroom has been set-up with a series of challenges, clues, and riddles all related to Wegener’s Theory of Continental Drift. Can you apply what you have learned to solve the puzzles? Can you put all the pieces together to decode the mystery of Plate Tectonics? Use all the clues, problem solve, and work cooperatively as a team.

The Story: Meso Zoic, a young paleontologist working at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, received a letter written about ten years ago, by his estranged father, Paleo Zoic. Before his disappearance, Paleo Zoic, a highly respected paleontologist, was working on a very important project that would change the written history of Earth forever. In the letter, his father, long believed dead, hints at a fantastic discovery that will make him rich… a key to evidence when uncovered, will change the fossil records forever. Mezo searched his father’s office and found some luggage boxes said to be of great importance from the Zoic family collection. Searching for his father’s glory, Mezo has asked that you help him begin to unravel the greatest mystery of American paleontology.

But will you unearth it in time?

The Challenge: The classroom has been set-up with a series of challenges, clues, and riddles all related to fossil evidence in the Mesozoic time period. Can you apply what you haved learned to solve the puzzles? Can you put all the pieces together to decode the mystery described in Paleo Zoic’s letter? Use all the clues, problem solve, and work cooperatively as a team.