Monday 9/9/19 Each group prepares and then presents a presentation for a town hall meeting in which they convince community members to adopt their recommended solution for addressing the problem of purple loosestrife in the nature preserve.
Presentations should include:
Who their group represents
Basic information about their group
The characteristics they think are important in a control method (criteria)
The results of their decision (which control method is best)
Reasons their group supports that control method
Tuesday 9/10/19 Students present their solution to the problem. Then class votes on which is the best method.
Wednesday 9/11/19 Students experience how using a model can make communicating about complicated phenomena much easier, by simplifying the real world into a system and describing that system through a model. The focus is on how the model helped us communicate about the phenomena, not on identifying the boundary, inputs, outputs, parts, the relationship between parts, or flow of material within the model. We simply intend to give students an experience centered around a system model’s power to simplify and communicate complicated ideas.
Thursday 9/12/19 and Friday 9/13/19 Students are introduced to systems and subsystems by examining a Rube Goldberg machine. They observe that the parts of one system can be made up of smaller systems called subsystems. Students also observe how the output of one subsystem becomes the input for the next subsystem. Students express these observations by creating a system model of a subsystem within a Rube Goldberg Machine.