The Best Laid Plans...

Today was a day chock full of planning! Seriously... 8 hours of planning! But it was awesome! I can only speak for myself, but I was able to see science in a completely new way and I was pumped to help plan a unit and lesson for the students that are coming next week!

We are teaching week 2 of the camp and our section of the unit is centered around this question: How does water consumption, waste, dining habits/procedures, and energy consumption effect the George Mason University campus community? From there, we took each of the 4 components and broke them into topics to cover for Monday-Thursday with a culminating activity on Friday. Our group chose to focus on water consumption.

In order to tie in the material from the previous week (ecosystems), we decided to take students to the pond to collect water samples. While at the pond, they will be asked to make observations and then ponder whether they think the pond is healthy or not and to justify their answer. They will collect their samples and we will journey back to the lab. Along the way we will discuss the watershed and how water travels on campus. The students will use the pond water to analyze and collect data about its pH, turbidity, coliform content, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. (In case you were wondering, we have all of the materials to evaluate each of those things! WHOA! It's like Christmas for a teacher!) Students will then be able to reflect back on their initial observations and decide whether the pond truly is healthy by asking nature of science type questions: What does healthy mean, in terms of the pond? How does our data support your response? Does our data help you define "healthy"? What, if anything, do you think needs to change about the health of the pond? How could we do that?

After lunch, we begin talking about water consumption. We will ask students about how much water they think they use in a day and why that's even important to ask when we're talking about ecosystems. To emphasize this concept, we're taking students on a "field trip" to a dorm. They will go into the bathroom... an adventure in it's own rite... and, with a stopwatch and a bucket, they will collect the water from the shower that flows out in 1 minute. Students will then measure the capacity of their collection. When we return to the classroom, we will find the average time the students spend in the shower and using our previous "shower data" figure out how much water is used in a shower. To make it even bigger, students will use the number of college students at mason to figure out how many gallons of water are used for showers alone on campus.

After we have collected this data, we will be sure to pose the questions: do your results surprise you? Is there anything else we should have taken into consideration when calculating water consumption? We will talk about the results in the context of the STARS rating: Do you think the amount of water used is excessive? If so, do you have any suggestions for cutting down water consumption on campus? What are they and how would you implement them?

To close out the day, we will take 30 minutes for them to compile their information that they will use for their culminating activity. Our "undercover agents" will be producing a multimedia presentation to present their findings and recommendations to the "STARS Board" (the movers, shakers, and rating makers made up of GMU professors and others TBA!) at a "community forum" (community members being parents!). Students will be "strutting their scientific stuff" they have done over the course of 2 weeks by showing what they did, how they did it, what they found, and what they suggest!

Seriously... how totally awesome is this?!

Tomorrow- peer reviewing each others' lessons!

Questions, the Nature of Science, and technology...

Today started off in a less than ideal fashion. For some reason my alarm didn't go off this morning, and I woke up to a phone call asking where I was at 7:47 this morning. Class started at 8. Oops! (FYI... We did make it on time!)

When we got to class, we started right in on developing a question map based on our problem and scenario that we will pose to our campers. Problem: How does George Mason University impact the ecosystems within the campus community? Scenario (Summary): Mason has hired you as undercover investigators to surrounding their efforts to be noted as an environmentally friendly campus and achieve a Sustainability Tracking Assesment and Rating System (STARS) rating. Your job is to investigate the campus and report back to the board of visitors about your findings. (Find out more about what STARS is at https://stars.aashe.org/ ).

We needed to pose questions under our level 1 question (the problem) at levels 2 and 3, becoming more specific as we moved down the hierarchy. Each group brainstormed questions we thought were relevant, arranged them into like-concepts, and placed them into their appropriate levels.

The question map took a great deal of thought and effort to put together. In fact, we spent the entire morning tweaking our map! It is so incredibly crucial that the questions flow and fit together conceptually, so that students can reap the benefits of their own scientific investigations.

After lunch, we were able to have some "play time"! Well, it was playtime for me! We were shown how to use technology designed to aid in scientific investigation. My favorite was the pH probe! We were given 3 diluted soil samples and we placed a USB probe into the samples. The pH was uploaded automatically into a chart and then into a line graph. We were able to use temperature, turbidity (light transmittance), and salinity probes, as well as microscopes! My mind was racing with all of the possibilities with these technologies!

We also discussed the Nature of Science, which is kind of hard to wrap my head around; but that's why I'm here, to sort this confusing stuff out! After a while, I was totally able to see the purpose in introducing the Nature of Science. When students are faced with questions asking them to think about why things are the way they are and intentionally observe the natural world, scientific concepts come to life! For instance, we were asked what a frog was. Do I know what a frog is? Of course! However, can I tell you what it is that makes a frog a frog? That's a little trickier! After that question was posed, I was able to observe a frog. Instantly, there was purpose to my observations. I didn't feel like I was just going through the motions and I truly believe that I observed characteristics about the frog that I wouldn't ordinarily have noticed in any other context. Wow- it's like a whole new world!

Tomorrow- LESSON PLANNING!!! (This may be the first time I've been this excited about it!)

Inquiry, Nature of Science, and PBL... Oh My!

Today was absolutely chock full of awesome science stuff from the get-go! There was no time to waste! We started our first day here at the Elementary Science Institute (here on out referred to as science camp!) by taking a survey. I must say that I felt less than, well, educated at the conclusion of it. I faced questions like "define the nature of science." Huh?!

My anxiety soon faded as we jumped head-first into problem solving. We were given the following scenario: Hurricane Arlene has hit the Chesapeake Bay region and an oil tanker was caught in the storm. Oil is everywhere! How is this oil spill affecting the ecosystem and what can we do about it?

We discovered that one of the animals hit hardest by oil spills are birds, particularly ducks. We were able to design an investigation to make new discoveries about the feathers of a duck, the properties of oil, and cleaning agents. How could our discoveries lend themselves to the cleanup effort? We researched, hypothesized, formulated, procedure-ized, tested, and concluded. We had crash landed into the world of Problem-Based Learning (PBL). And all of this before lunch!

After lunch we were given the task of creating a problem and scenario having to do with measuring the human impact on ecosystems. Amazing discussion and ideas filled the room! But... what fun would it be to tell everything on day one? Until tomorrow... :)