Spine-Backed Globster

Protecting an Ecosystem with Engineering Skills

Grades 6-12

An invasive species is destroying a marine ecosystem and diminishing biodiversity.

• Respectfully provide and receive critiques about one's explanations, procedures, models, and questions by citing relevant evidence and posing and responding to questions that elicit pertinent elaboration and detail.

• Construct, use, and/or present an oral and written argument supported by empirical evidence and scientific reasoning to support or refute an explanation or a model for a phenomenon or a solution to a problem.

• Evaluate competing design solutions based on jointly developed and agreed-upon design criteria.

• Construct an explanation that includes qualitative or quantitative relationships between variables that predict(s) and/or describe(s) phenomena.

• Construct a scientific explanation based on valid and reliable evidence obtained from sources (including the students' own experiments) and the assumption that theories and laws that describe the natural world operate today as they did in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

• Apply scientific ideas, principles, and/or evidence to construct, revise and/or use and explanation for real-world phenomena, examples, or events.

• Apply scientific reasoning to show why the data or evidence is adequate for the explanation or conclusion.

• Optimize performance of a design by prioritizing criteria, making tradeoffs, testing, revising, and retesting.

• Define a design problem that can be solved through the development of an object, tool, process or system and includes multiple criteria and constraints, including scientific knowledge that may limit possible solutions.

• Construct, analyze, and/or interpret graphical displays of data and/or large data sets to identify linear and nonlinear relationships.

• Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for phenomena.

• Analyze data to define an optimal operational range for a proposed object, tool, process or system that best meets criteria for success.

• Students explain stability and change in natural or designed systems by examining changes over time, and considering forces at different scales, including the atomic scale. Students learn changes in one part of a system might cause large changes in another part, systems in dynamic equilibrium are stable due to a balance of feedback mechanisms, and stability might be disturbed by either sudden events or gradual changes that accumulate over time.

• Students classify relationships as causal or correlational, and recognize that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. They use cause and effect relationships to predict phenomena in natural or designed systems. They also understand that phenomena may have more than one cause, and some cause and effect relationships in systems can only be described using probability.

• Ecosystem characteristics vary over time. Disruptions to any part of any ecosystem can lead to shifts in all of its populations. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

• Changes in biodiversity can influence humans' resources and ecosystem service they rely on.

• The more precisely a design task’s criteria and constraints can be defined, the more likely it is that the designed solution will be successful. Specification of constraints includes consideration of scientific principles and other relevant knowledge that are likely to limit possible solutions (e.g., familiarity with the local climate may rule out certain plants for the school garden).

• A solution needs to be tested, and then modified on the basis of the test results, in order to improve it. There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem. Sometimes parts of different solutions can be combined to create a solution that is better than any of its predecessors. In any case, it is important to be able to communicate and explain solutions to others. Models of all kinds are important for testing solutions, and computers are a valuable tool for simulating systems. Simulations are useful for predicting what would happen if various parameters of the model were changed, as well as for making improvements to the model based on peer and leader (e.g., teacher) feedback.

• There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem. Comparing different designs could involve running them through the same kinds of tests and systematically recording the results to determine which design performs best. Although one design may not perform the best across all tests, identifying the characteristics of the design that performed the best in each test can provide useful information for the redesign process—that is, some of those characteristics may be incorporated into the new design. This iterative process of testing the most promising solutions and modifying what is proposed on the basis of the test results leads to greater refinement and ultimately to an optimal solution. Once such a suitable solution is determined, it is important to describe that solution, explain how it was developed, and describe the features that make it successful.