Hello! This blog post is the summary and story of my first Science project, Handle with Care! In this project we learned about the ecosystem and the earth’s Spheres. The Driving Question for this project was: “In what ways have human beings impacted the delicate cycles within our local ecosystems and how can we lessen our impact?”

The first thing thing we talked about is a basic understanding of the project and the concept. The concept is that the earth is made up of different Spheres and cycles that humans often impact in negative ways. We learned some terms and then we started work on our first keystone. There is one thing that you should know before reading this post. The Spheres of the earth. There are five Spheres: the Atmosphere (Gases surrounding earth), Geosphere (rocks of the earth), Biosphere (all living things on earth, including plants and animals), Hydrosphere (all the water on earth), and Cryosphere (all the ice of the earth). The keystone was about making a interactive Scratch program (or other media) that showed off a foodweb you chose. A foodweb is kind of like a 3D foodchain. It shows all the possible interactions in an ecosystem, not just one chain of it. 

The foodweb I chose to do was the North American Rain Forest. I chose this because I knew it well and I grew up with it. I included a number of animals and plants. The animals I included were bear, deer, eagle, squirrel, salmon, and insects. The plants I included were berries, trees, grass, and moss. After I chose what I wanted to include in my foodweb, I started to draw them. This took a bit of time but it was not to bad (I could watch shows and talk with people while I did it). Once I had finished all the drawing I started putting them into Scratch. I then hooked up some buttons that said what they eat and are eaten by. If you want to see what the end product was, here it is: HERE. And that was my process for the first Keystone. It was too complicated but it got the idea across, I liked this one. The part that took the longest was drawing all of the parts I was going to include.

The second keystone was a group project. It was a news report on an ecosystem the teacher chose for us. My group was me, Cameron L, Jupiter, and Kai. The ecosystem we had to write about was the sea urchins and kelp forests in California. I think it was in California, I could be wrong. The first day we researched it and answered some questions. This is the situation. There was/is a disease called Sea Star Wasting Disease. It killed of nearly all of the sunflower sea star. These sea stars were the main predator of the purple sea urchins. With the sea stars gone the purple sea urchin population started growing. Because it was growing they eat more. They ended up eating up nearly all the kelp forests. This severely effected all fish who lived in the forest for safety. The fish left and the former kelp forest area became zone of nothing but death and sea urchins. If you want more details watch my video. I then wrote the script and we practiced. The final day we practiced more and then filmed. Over the weekend Cameron edited it and make the final product. This was a fun keystone and I’m glad for who I got for partners. IMG_3592

The final Keystone was the 5 Media Posts. I didn’t know about this for a week because I had to take a week off school for personal reasons. When I got back it was already too late but I was still going to complete it. My friend, Caden, hadn’t worked on it either so we decided to be partners. The goal of this keystone was too revisit things we had learned and make a fake social media post about them informing the public. I got three and Caden took two. I then started working. The first one was about the Sphere’s and how humans impacted them. The next one was about  foodwebs and the final about something new, something dangerous… no not dangerous. Nutrient cycles. There isn’t much I can talk about these because they are just mini paragraphs with some photos. I can tell the jokes behind some of them though. The Mr. Clean one has the most. First of all the numbers at the bottom. The number of retweets is the number of youtube channels called Mr. Clean. The number of likes is the number of subscribers the real Mr. Clean YouTube channel has. Finally the date it was posted was the date Mr. Clean was invented. I did my research. We actually got this final keystone done in just two days with the power of friendship and the power of working at home. (The teacher was impressed)

I think I did pretty well in this project. I took notes, I did the work. I don’t think I did incredible work, more like around a B or in PLP terms a ☀️. I thing I could have done better with is staying on task. I was distracted by kids and friends a couple of times but thats bound to happen. I would even go as far as to say its good, if you don’t interrupt the teacher and you get your work done. I also found the topic of this project really interesting. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We got a new Science (its not Scimatics anymore, only Science) teacher. She is very nice and chill. I really like her and I feel comfortable with her. Or as much as you can with a teacher. 

See ya around and goodbye, Judah G!