The University of Colorado hosts an interactive Radioactive Dating Game that teaches students about carbon and other radiometric dating types, as well as half-life and decay functions. Students must match the age of items with the percentage of dating elements remaining to win the game. This game can be downloaded for play on computers in classrooms, or it can be played online. This game is also translated into dozens of languages ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese. Related teaching materials and games are also linked on the website.
Montana's Office of Public Education offers a lesson plan which teaches students about radiometric dating using information provided online about American Indian bison bones and prehistoric kill sites. The plan guides students through the radiometric analysis of prehistoric evidence, radiometric terminology and half-lives of carbon 14. Instructions for in-classroom half-life graphing games are also included.
Carleton College's Education Department's website has instructions for a hands-on radiometric dating activity. The activity calls for students to simulate half-life properties of isotopes using bags of beads as "rocks and fossils." Appropriate for grades 5 to 8, the activity assigns parent isotopes to different color beads and asks students to solve problems such as arranging the "fossils" in age from youngest to oldest and finding the two "fossils" which are closest in age. The college also offers a game that simulates radioactive decay using dice. Students create a standard decay curve for a fictional element then use the graph information to date "rocks" with the element in them.
The University of California's Museum of Paleontology offers a lesson plan for radiometric dating, which includes sequencing activities and card games. Students are taught the concepts of prehistoric time and radiometric dating using fossil cards and rock strata cards that can be printed from pdf files. The cards must be arranged in proper sequences. After grasping time concepts, students move on to integrate the fossils and rock layers to establish their age. An instructional video explaining radiometric dating is available on the Teachers' Domain site. The video segment comes with follow-up discussion questions and printable essays for the classroom.