Week 3: Ecological Footprint and Scientific Method

On Monday, I worked with the environmental science students on the ecological footprint activity in the computer lab. Your ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of goods and services that are required to sustain your life. This about how much land your house covers, how much land it takes to grow/raise your food, how much land it takes to dispose of your waste, and the space which is required to contain the energy resources that you use for electricity and transportation. The calculator, available on the internet, then extrapolates you’re footprint to the entire world population, telling you how many earths would be required if everyone lived like you do.

It was interesting to do the activity with them, and to watch them working through the questions that they were given. I could tell some of them starting making connections between the selections that they had made relative to their peers in the lab, and the number of planets that appeared in the summary. One student even asked me what would happen if they said that they lived in Australia instead of the US. I told them to try it, and they discovered that not only was the answer different, but some of the questions were different also. And in the end, their footprint was smaller if they lived in Australia. We compared the profiles and discovered, not surprisingly, that energy was a major difference between the US and Australia.

In biology, I helped students with a scientific method lesson, where they were identifying parts of experiments including dependent and independent variables, control and experimental groups, from a set of experiments fictitiously carried out by characters from the Simpsons on the internet. The original assignment was for them to find definitions for their terms on the internet, and then proceed to the site with the experiments listed. However, it became obvious that the students were having difficulties finding definitions that were going to make it easier to do the second part of the assignment correctly, so Mr. Sowder instead gave them definitions. I had tried to have them sift through all of the definitions that they were finding to determine one which seemed the most useful in scientific study (as Mr. Sowder had suggested that they do when they encountered more than one definition) but I was pleased when they were given definitions that were clear and related to the second part of the activity.

I thought that the lesson was well suited for the students, because reading about Homer and green slime is more fun than most scientific experiments that I know. I also thought that it was interesting that Mr. Sowder was having them really think about the steps of the scientific method and the elements of a scientific experiment outside of traditional science experiments. I think that having students connect the concepts to somewhat irrelevant stories will strengthen their understanding of the material.