Fold Mountain Builder
NGSS MS-ESS2-2
Read the standard: MS-ESS2-2
Squeeze layers of rock between colliding plates and watch a mountain range fold up in front of you.
About This Interactive
What do students do?
There's limestone with seashell fossils near the summit of Everest, and this interactive lets students work out how it got there. They squeeze flat layers of rock between two colliding plates and watch the strata buckle into anticlines and synclines, then push harder on one side to lean the folds over. They grow two kinds of magma intrusion, a dyke cutting across the layers and a sill sliding between them, and finally they erode the mountain down, uncovering the folded layers and leaving the hard igneous rock standing as ridges. The height graph pits uplift against erosion, so students can measure exactly how much wearing-down cancels a given squeeze.
What does it cover?
NGSS MS-ESS2-2: construct an explanation based on evidence for how geoscience processes have changed Earth's surface at varying time and spatial scales. Along the way students use cross-cutting relationships to reason about age, because a dyke must be younger than every layer it cuts. Key vocabulary: compression, anticline, syncline, dyke, sill, erosion.
How long does it take?
20 to 30 minutes for the quick version, or one 50 minute middle school lesson from the built-in plan.
What does it run on?
Every SciMinis interactive runs free in the browser with nothing to install and no accounts, on Chromebooks, laptops, tablets, and phones. It's fully bilingual: one tap switches the whole interactive, worksheet included, between English and Spanish.
What do teachers get?
Each interactive ships with vocabulary flashcards, a ten-question worksheet students can export as a PDF, and complete NGSS-aligned lesson plans: a 20 to 30 minute quick version and a full timed 5E lesson. The lesson plans and answer key stay behind a free teacher password, so students can't peek.