We’ve just completed a project on Matter Cycles! The easiest way to describe the work I did on our last Scimatics project would be to describe how I used a few curricular competencies. 

The first curricular competency I’ll focus on is ‘Contribute to finding solutions to problems at a local and/or global level through inquiry.’ This was a super helpful competency during the first part of our project. We chose to research the water cycle, and a negative impact on it. The negative impact we chose is pesticides ending up in rivers, lakes, and oceans. 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides are used every year, and some of that becomes runoff into bodies of water. We wanted to solve this by coming up with our own non-harmful pesticide. After some deliberation, we decided to design an insect. Our insect, the purple spotted beetle, is a carnivore, and eats a wide variety of bugs that eat crops. This competency really helped me understand our final product.

Another curricular competency I’ll focus on is ‘Formulate Multiple Hypotheses and Predict Multiple Outcomes.’  This was a huge aspect of the project. Once we had our solution to the negative impact on our cycle, we had to figure out what the other impacts of our solution could be. The first thing we came up with was that our bug could be dangerous. It would be very simple for it to escape wherever it was put and become an invasive species somewhere else. Because our insect survives by eating so many other insects, it could take out the primary producers and consumers of a different ecosystem’s food chain. It could also disrupt the carbon cycle or force another species to evolve to survive it.

Another competency that was important was ‘Analyze cause-and effect relationships.’ We mostly used this competency when we were studying the different matter cycles, and how impacting one could impact them all. We also did a debate on which matter cycles was the most important, and not to brag, but my team won. That not what’s important though. A point that was brought up in the debate was that the water cycle could change the flow of the nitrogen cycle, bringing minerals filled with nitrogen through erosion from rivers, and negatively affect itself. The negative effect, in this case, was giant algal blooms in oceans. A little less than one percent of algal blooms create so-called ‘dead zones’, where nothing can live. This was a really interesting topic to debate, and this competency helped us debate it.

The last curricular competency this post will focus on is ‘Evaluate the validity and limitations of a model or analogy in relation to the phenomenon modelled.’ We used this after creating our model. Now, to create an insect, you would need millions, maybe billions of dollars for research funding, and incredibly smart people. Now, there’s also the problem of the moral consequences of, you know, creating a life. Maybe the bug has a small problem with it that nobody was able to foresee, and all of these little bugs have to be put down, and all of the money goes to waste. I don’t think we’ll be seeing genetically engineered bugs for a while, at least. This competency helped us to complete our project. 

Thanks for reading my blog post!