One of the major themes that runs through many facets of science is the notion of surface area to volume ratio. I remember being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya and using an experimental, guided-inquiry curriculum, inspired by the British Nuffield science program. Students made plasticine cubes of various sizes. I’m not sure why British people have an aversion to clay, but plasticine seems to be their school sculpting material. Then students measured the surface area of the cubes and calculated the volume. Then they calculated the surface area to volume ratio and discover that the larger the object, the smaller the surface area to volume ratio.
Which helps to explain many types of adaptations in biology and why individual cells can’t be the size of houses; they would simply not have enough surface area to absorb the materials they need, like oxygen, or to expel waste. From villi in the intestines to convolutions in the brain, our bodies have many adaptations to increase surface area.
Adaptive Curriculum has a guided inquiry Activity Object called “Surface Area to Volume Ratio in Organisms.” A clever engagement draws the students into the interactive experience. You have a plate of cheese with different size cubes that you are going to put into the microwave. But first, learners predict whether the large cubes or the small cubes will melt first.
Obviously, the small cheese cubes will melt before the larger ones. If you thought this, you have experienced a discrepant event. In actuality, the large cubes melt first. Since the microwave heats from the inside, the smaller cubes lose their heat faster than the large ones. The larger cubes, thus retain more heat and melt faster. Discrepant events are powerful, because learners want to know why they were wrong.
From this, learners virtually change the size of cubes and see the changes in surface area, volume, and surface area to volume ratio. Then body sizes and shapes of animals are explored, as students learn about the implications of size and shape for heat loss.
My Peace Corps teaching and Adaptive Curriculum are different modes of guided inquiry and discovery learning, but both can help produce deep and life long learning.
Back in 1985 I was fortunate enough to visit George Awad’s New York studio where he was using his architectural skills and space interests to construct a scale model of the universe. Awad used one million of his own dollars to make this and it was very impressive and enlightening.
This is how Carl Sagan (1997) described it in his book THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
Perhaps the grandest museum exhibit can’t be seen. It has no home: George Awad is one of the leading architectural model makers in America, specializing in skyscrapers. He is also a dedicated student of astronomy who has made a spectacular model of the Universe. Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe. Every astronomical body is meticulously detailed. You can lose yourself in them. It’s one of the best tools I know of to explain the scale and nature of the Universe to children. Isaac Asimov described it as ‘the most imaginative representation of the universe that I have ever seen, or could have conceived of. I could have wandered through it for hours, seeing something new at every turn that I hadn’t observed before.’ Versions of it ought to be available throughout the country – for stirring the imagination, for inspiration and for teaching. But instead, Mr Awad cannot give this exhibit to any major science museum in the country. No one is willing to devote to it the floor space needed. As I write, it still sits forlornly, crated in storage.
In my office, I have the model of the Big Dipper that George Awad gave me during that 1985 visit. After seeing so many 2-dimensional drawings of the big dipper, the model is a 3-dimensional view that shows how relative size and distance influence what we see in the night sky.
Then there was the famous Powers of Ten Video (or applet) that gave us the broad view of the universe and kept on magnifying by ten, until we arrived in Florida, and then descended into a plant.
Now the folks at Primax Studio have done their own Scale of the Universe with drawn images, instead of partially using photographs, but the music and the interactive aspects make it delightful to explore.
The scale of the universe is difficult to fully appreciate but we are getting closer due to multimedia tools. A 3-d Imax movie will soon be in theaters.
The videos on television show some of the massive destruction and the human toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti. It is difficult to imagine the suffering of the Haitian people. It is an unfortunate example of the devastation of a magnitude 7 earthquake.
It is natural to wonder why or how. When students are ready, teachers may want to discuss earthquakes and their causes.
The folks at IRIS have a website with a PowerPoint presentation and Quicktime movie that explain a lot of details associated with this particular earthquake and earthquakes in general. The PowerPoint has excellent pictures of the destruction to buildings, without presenting images of human suffering that would be difficult for some students. The image to the right is taken from the PowerPoint.
IRIS (AKA the Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology) has lots of resources for learning about earthquakes including SeisMac 2.0 which allows Macintosh computers to become seismographs.
In the quest for Science Literacy, we strive to give students an understanding of natural events before they happen. Adaptive Curriculum has two strong Activity Objects, one is on determining the magnitude of an earthquake and the other is determining the location of the earthquake. The image below is from “Earthquakes: Measuring Magnitude.“
I had the good fortune last week of being a conference presider for Irfan Kula, a talented educational designer. His session was “I Love Symbiosis.” He emailed me his PowerPoint presentation, and I am presenting this here: i-love-symbiosis-kula.
I am at the NYSCATE Metro Conference, in Rye, NY. I grew up about 45 minutes from here but I forgot that it is still cold in mid-May. But of course, everything is relative, and relative to Arizona almost everywhere else is cooler.
The Texas Computers in Education Association conference just ended and I am on the plane heading home. It is a nice conference, with lots of exhibitors, presenters, and attendees. I am going to infer that Texas loves science, because at my presentation, which had a narrow niche of middle school science, critical thinking, and state standards, I estimate there were 300+ people.I posted the PowerPoint for this presentation on the last blog.
I thank District Administration’s Kurt Dyrliand Scholastic Administrator’s Ken Royal, who did one of the first articles about Adaptive Curriculum after interviewing me about two years ago at FETC. Ken really enjoyed the Activity Object on Francisco Redi, who helped disprove the idea of spontaneous generation. When Ken was a former science teacher he did this science experiment in class, replete with decaying meat and putrid smells.
It will be interesting to see if the idea of video blogging takes off. I suspect that it will do well as a medium, as long as it has either more attractive or loquacious people than me!
I have the good fortune to be in beautiful Austin, Texas today for the Texas Computer Education Association’s (TCEA) annual convention. Austin is a delightful city, and this conference is huge. In a couple of hours I am going to be doing my presentation “Critical Thinking and TEKS Science Content Via Online Activities.”
I am placing the PowerPoint file here for participants and anyone else interested in this topic. Below are some titles and resources from the presentation.
demonstrate basic relationships between force and motion using simple machines including pulleys and levers (TEKS: 7.6)
http://2dboy.com/games.php
Creature Creator
prelude to Spore
Free trial edition
How can students making creatures
Develop science content?
Develop critical thinking?
Or both?
Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects
Dancing with the Bees
TEKS 6.12: responses to external stimuli
Determining Planet Layers from Seismic Waves
TEKS 6.6 identify forces that shape features of the Earth; 7.2: organize, analyze, make inferences, and predict trends from direct and indirect evidence
Groundwater
TEKS 6.1: make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources; 6.14 groundwater
This blog focusing on using technology to improve science teaching and learning has been in existence since June 2008. The list of 2008 blog titles for Ed-tech-4-science with publishing dates are presented below. I made hotlinks for articles that I think classroom teachers of science would find most useful. Then I put the titles into Wordle to get the image below.
Using gooey balls, in the “World of Goo,” to make towers and bridges is an engaging way to build conceptual ideas in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The game made by a team of two guys (Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel) at “2D Boy” won the Innovation Award and Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival. Goo is available for PCs, Macs, and the Wii. IGN named Goo the best Wii game of the year.In my house, the free trial download version of Goo won the “Win Over the Skeptical 11 Year-Old Award” for totally engaging my son—who proclaimed, “This is addicting!” My eight-year old son called it “very fun.”
That shows the power of Goo. A game that requires no instructions, but you proceed from level-to-level building things to transport the living goo balls. There is something satisfying about building the goo structures, and something powerful about completing the puzzle at each level. Okay, the goo ball creatures and game remind me a bit of the Zoombinis, and the puzzle contexts are not the greatest, but building the structures to solve the puzzle is intriguing and satisfying. And who wants to waste time learning elaborate storylines when there are goo structures to build?
In my trial of the free on-line sample, I built towers and then bridges. Then my 11-year old son took over, starting anew, and quickly blazed past me to get to build balloon structures to help fight gravity. Neither of us met the minimal goo ball rescue at the “Impale Sticky” level, but fortunately we were able to skip this level when we were left a few balls short.
Building a goo structure is difficult to describe but easy to do. You pull one of the goo balls and separate it from the structure. Two or three white “lines of force” (my term not theirs) appear and when you stop pulling it, the white lines become goo links joining the ball to the previous structure. Of course there is a lot of jiggling and the pull of gravity is evident. If you pull a ball too far away from the others, the lines of force disappear and you realize you need to put it closer.
Science Education and Goo
Linking goo balls forms triangular tresses, which are important units of engineering design. Through trial-and-error learning, we experience that triangle goo formations are easy to build and stable. It is a nice contrast, because it seems in the world of play (from Lincoln Logs™ to Legos™), rectangular formations dominate. The tresses are then used to build towers, bridges, and dangling structures. There is a nice science (and international touch) in the use of metric measurements such a “you have 4.4 meters to go.”
The physics of Goo feels pretty real, and this can be a bridge to many physics concepts. As you build structures, the notions of a good foundation and center of gravity come into play. Build it one way too far, and it falls down; keep the center of gravity above the base, and the tower rises. There is also a sense of harmonics/resonance/vibration in that if your structure starts to bend and bob, you have to be careful that your additions don’t cause more of this in an undesired direction.
At some higher levels of Goo, buoyancy comes into play, along with levers and moments, as balloons lift up lever arms. When this is applied to building a bridge, the balloon placement is critical because too much lift or too little gets the balloons popped. Placing the balloon closer or further from the pivot point can decrease or increase the lift.
For chemistry, the most obvious notion is the idea of adhesion and cohesion. Goo balls being attracted to other goo balls is cohesion. When they stick to something else, like the level where you have to climb up out of a canyon and make them stick to the walls, you have adhesion.
How do you Goo?
If you are teaching an engineering class, I think you have good justification to buy a class set of the “World of Goo.” I also think this would make a great addition to the computers of an elementary school computer lab. I can imagine Mr. Cosgrove (my fifth grade teacher) saying: “After you finish your graphs, if you have time you can Goo.” But for stepping softly into the “World of Goo,” give your students an extra-credit assignment to download the free version (link) at home and complete a certain number of levels. They can use screenshots to prove (and display) their work.
Edu-Goo
Winning awards is great and selling lots of this game must be pretty exciting to the creators. But I think the next endeavor should be an Edu-Goo product line. The possibilities are endless so I will just name three: (a) Online competitions between classes, schools, or the world to see who can build the Goo bridge to support the most weight, (b) three-dimensional Goo structures so students can explore using triangular versus rectangular tresses, (c) DNA Goo, where students can construct DNA double helix molecules. Less exciting but useful are worksheets that can guide exploration and discovery. Edu-Goo could have a teacher contribution page so teachers can contribute ideas about educational uses of Goo.
Back on September 11, 2008, I wrote about the new Spore game and expressed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.After the incredible hype approaching the release, the media has been pretty silent.
PBS’ “Online NewsHour”, however, did post this article in October: “New ‘Fun Biology’ Video Game Lets Players Tinker with Evolution”. It seems like PBS put “fun” in quotes because they know it isn’t really fun. The author, Quinn Bowman, goes on to reference my blog entry:
Educational value
Educators are mixed over whether Spore belongs in the classroom.
Professor Peter Rillero of Arizona State University wrote on his blog, which focuses on using technology to teach science, that the mechanics of the creature creation in Spore did not accurately reflect how evolution works.
“The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired?” Rillero wrote. ”
But then Bowman adds this quote:
“However, University of Florida associate professor of geology Joe Meert said games like Spore ‘are a natural place for students to gravitate to.’ ’Even the things that (Spore) gets wrong, it could be a teachable moment. Here’s something the game gets wrong. Why is it wrong?’
Dr. Meert seems like a fascinating and good guy and he is someone who wants the public to understand evolution. So with some reluctance I say his comments remind me of College of Education field offices telling interns with crummy mentor teachers, “Well at least you will learn what not to do.” Spore tried to show itself as a great science education tool. We have to recognize first and foremost, that it is not. Teachers should have great mentors, our children should have great science education resources.
I don’t go around boring my friends and family talking about scientific inaccuracies in the media around me.I would not expect history educators to criticize Call of Duty’s portrayal of WWII history. Unless of course, the game made claims that it was a great way to learn history, and started touting all of the historians that had been consulted in developing the game.Spore, on the other hand, deserves to be criticized.
Not only was Spore incredibly hyped, it wanted to develop the idea that it would promote an understanding of evolution. This was evident in the September 9th TV Show: “Build a Better Being” produced and aired by the National Geographic Channel through a partnership with Spore. Getting famous evolutionary biologists to talk about their work, and then showing scenes from Spore, could have encouraged many to falsely believe that the evolutionary biologists were supporting it.
This is far from the case, and the journal Science reported complaints by scientists involved in the documentary. “I literally never heard about Spore until I saw myself on television in this infomercial about the game,” says Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard University. “It’s an outrage (as quoted by Bohannon, 2008).”
Other Voices of Concern
Fortunately, I am not the lone voice in criticizing Spore. Here are some other views that are critical of the “evolutionary science” in Spore.
It is, in reality, a relatively standard real-time strategy game with the same basic unlocking of features, upgrading of levels, and choices about aesthetics and function as with vehicles or buildings in other similar games. The units happen to look like organisms, the features that can be added are mouths, eyes, and limbs, and the currency is called “DNA”, but really that does not make the game anything more than superficially biological.
So over the past month, I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.
Manure
How does the game’s creator Will Wright respond to the controversy? Well despite the scientific inaccuracies in Spore, he concludes: “It’s manure to seed future scientists” (as quoted by Highfield, 2008). Some quotes are so good they don’t need further commentary.
Enjoyment
Of course there is also the issue of how enjoyable this game is. Here is a clip from the New York Times (Schiesel, December 2008):
BEST DISAPPOINTMENT: SPORE If Electronic Arts has learned anything from its experience with Spore, it ought to be that a software company should just let its games do the talking, rather than relentlessly hyping a game for years before its release only to deliver a one-note electronic toy in the end. Spore would not have fizzled so quickly if expectations had not been so ludicrously inflated to begin with. Perhaps more important, it showed that maybe even a game god like Will Wright, the game’s creator, can stand to be reminded of the basics once in a while. Spore was great at letting the player create something from nothing. But in the end it just wasn’t that interesting to play with. Making cool stuff is a great part of video games, but the play, more than in any other media, really is the thing.
Promoting Spore
Yet, many people are willing to promote Spore because it has science in it and is therefore thought to be educational. It is not difficult to find quotes like this:“With its educational subject matter, Spore is the kind of game any parent should be pleased to find their child absorbed in” (Alderman, 2008).
Conclusions
Since all of the pre-release and release hype, not much has been written about Spore. Pretending to be good science and actually promoting accurate science are different entities, and many in the media will take superficial views. There is a good chance that the media writers also hold serious science misconceptions, so they don’t even know when something is inaccurate. Therefore, it is up to scientists and science teachers to help the public understand which products are good educational tools for promoting science education.
References
Alderman, Naomi. (September 8, 2008). Spore: the game where only the fittest survive. The Guardian, Feature Pages, p. 3.
Bohannon, John (October 24, 2008). VIDEO GAMES: ’Spore’ Documentary Spawns Protest By Scientists Who Starred in It. Vol. 322. no. 5901, p. 517 DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5901.517a
Highfield, Roger. (September 9, 2008). How evolution inspired a computer game. The Daily Telegraph, Science, p. 27.
From this, learners virtually change the size of cubes and see the changes in surface area, volume, and surface area to volume ratio. Then body sizes and shapes of animals are explored, as students learn about the implications of size and shape for heat loss.
Using gooey balls, in the “World of Goo,” to make towers and bridges is an engaging way to build conceptual ideas in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The game made by a team of two guys (
How do you Goo?
essed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.
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