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= = **EDC G 611 - Summer 2011** **Prof. Donna DeGennaro** **Group 4** **Jordan C Girard;** **Sean H Bowles;** **Diego Mansilla** = = =**__Ecosystem in a Bottle__**=


 * Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks**
 * Life Science (Grades 6-8): Energy and Living Things; Changes in Ecosystems Over Time**

====1. Explain the roles and relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in the process of energy transfer in a food web. ==== ====2. Explain how dead plants and animals are broken down by other living organisms and how this process contributes to the system as a whole. ==== ====3. Recognize that producers (plants that contain chlorophyll) use the energy from sunlight to make sugars from carbon dioxide and water through a process called photosynthesis. This food can be used immediately, stored for later use, or used by other organisms. ====

**Lesson Background-** The Ecosystem in a bottle long-term lab is a project that will be done in small groups. Groups will be making their own mini-ecosystems, observing its changes, making predictions about its outcomes, discussing how these changes relate to a working ecosystem. This will be a self-guided exercise and will include an online component to allow groups to compile, arrange, and present their findings. Their final grade will be based on the design of their ecosystem, the contributions each student made to the data on their group’s wiki, and the presentation the group creates together on //Google Docs//.

**Introduction:** Consider what it would be like to be an astronaut traveling in a space station so far from Earth that you cannot receive any new supplies. Your space ship must be totally self-sufficient. What are the bare essential things that you need to stay alive? Air? Food? Water? A place to live? Companions? Energy? Your space ship has a finite size and limited space for living and storage. How do you keep from running out of those things so essential for life? Can they be renewed, recycled, or reconstructed? This idea of living on a finite space ship hurtling through space with a limited amount of supplies and room to live is not far fetched. We are all doing that today on the planet Earth. So far, the Earth has not run out of air, or food, or water. But could it?

To answer this question, we must explore some of the relationships that living organisms have with each other and with their environment. We call a community of organisms living and using its environment an ecosystem, and ecosystems seem to work by some basic rules. We hope that you and your classmates can discover those rules and see how they work by building small model ecosystems.

**Problem:** Can you build an enclosed, self-sustaining ecosystem in a small (one or two liter) plastic bottle? Can you design an environment that you can put organisms into (and then seal it shut so that it can't be opened) so that the organisms will live and thrive until the end of the school year?

**Lesson Procedure:**
 * 1) Students will break into groups and create their own mini-ecosystem using the parts and instructions provided to them. Please see pages 3 and 4 on the following link for the procedure: []
 * 2) Each group will build a wiki page online using Wikispace s(use this link to find it).
 * ‍Watch this [|video] to understand what is a wiki.
 * Read this [[file:Wikispaces for Students Presentation.ppt]]about Wikispaces
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Watch this [|video] on how to create your account.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Create your own account and wiki. [|Wikispace]s
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Invite your friends and your teacher to your wiki.
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Groups will use this to compile their daily data, observations, or changes that occur. They may also use the discussion tab on the wiki to make daily predictions, hypotheses, explanations and conclusions about their ecosystems. This is essentially the group’s lab notebook and journal.
 * 2) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Observations will continue for a three week period. At the beginning of each class, groups will look for changes and record their observations. They are looking at what is being successful in the ecosystem and what is not.
 * 3) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Their homework each night will be twofold:
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;"> To enter their data into the group’s wiki.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">One student in each group will post an explanation of the ecosystems current state, a prediction of what may happen to the ecosystem within the next few days (an educated guess), or some conclusions after looking at the data. This job will alternate each day to a new student in the group. Each student in the group will then post a comment in response to the initial discussion point.
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">At the end of the three week period, groups will create an online presentation using [|//Google Docs//].
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">You can watch an online tutorial on using Google Docs HERE
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Some specific help with creating Google Docs presentations HERE
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">This presentation will compile all of the data, observations, and conclusion they collected over the three week period. It should be reflective to help explain the relationships the organisms had with each other and their environment and portray an understanding of the cycles found in nature.

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