Large and slow processes with the Earth can be scaled to a table top device and directly obervable
- Students can watch mountains form in front of their eyes.
- The size the sandbox is five orders smaller than the crust so the strength of the sand needs to be five orders of magnitude weaker than crustal rocks
The sandbox is hands on and visual
- Students can participate in a variety of ways in the set up and running of the experiment.
- Student seketches serve as useful for assessing understanding
- In work with Deaf students, the visual nature of the sandboxes was 'language neutral'
The sandbox as a physical model facilitates learning
- The sandbox is more dynamic than a picture and more interative than an animation. Students can better understand the processes of mountain building when they participate in a sandbox experiment. This Science Teacher article (pdf) by Allan Feldman, Michele Cooke and Mary Ellsworth describes the use of the classroom sandbox as a physical model.
The sandbox can be used for hypothesis testing
- Because the sandbox can be manipulated, a variety of conditions can be investigated. This facilitates the development and testing of student hypotheses.
The Sandbox experiments meet several national science standards
- The physical processes that students observed and analyzed with the deformational sandbox are the focus of several improtant national science standards: Science Standards (doc) by Mary Ellsworth