World Population Activity I: Excel
This activity has been accepted by a Panel Peer Review.
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These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This page first made public: Jul 19, 2005
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Summary
Learning Goals
- input numbers and labels
- format fonts, numbers, alignment, and cell widths
- use simple equations and how to copy these to other cells to generate a table from a mathematical formula (analytical model)
- learn about fixed and variable cell references in Excel equations
- make and format graphs with multiple curves
- learn about population dynamics and the logistic growth equation.
Context for Use
Teaching Materials
- Activity Sheet (Excel 2003 version) (Acrobat (PDF) 1.2MB Aug10 03); Activity Sheet (Excel 2007 version) (Acrobat (PDF) 469kB Dec9 10)
- Answers Document (Excel 90kB Apr3 04) with several sheets representing different levels of completion. These Excel documents can be used for either:
- Introducing concepts and ideas in an interactive lecture
- making transparencies or power point slides
- checking student results
- Sample images of what's in the Excel Answer Document and what students are expected to accomplish.
Figure 1. Predicted (modeled) populations for imaginary planet Xox for different initial growth rate values r.
Figure 2. Predicted (modeled) population growth for imaginary planet Xox for different initial growth rate values r.
Teaching Notes and Tips
Assessment
Grading the completed activity sheet provided can be used as an assessment of student understanding. The future success of students on other Excel related activities is also another useful assessment tool.
An Excel Answers Document is provided above with several sheets representing different levels of completion for this activity. This can help instructors:
- assess student success for this activity;
- answer student questions that come up;
- quickly familiarize themselves with the activity.
References and Resources
In World Population Activity II, students compare actual data/projections of World Population from data files generated at UNEP.
The Resources for Earth Science and Geography Instruction site has several interesting links related to World population (more info) .
This link is a good generic resource for intro to Excel (more info)
Other Background information The solution to the logistic differential equation
is
Not only is it of interest here but is very popular in beginning discussions related to Chaos theory. Measuring Chaos: a hypertextbook (more info)
