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Jayanthi's evolution unit with excel  

This post was edited by Kit Pavlekovsky on Jul, 2012
The children in my 7th grade classroom used an interactive game to generate data about evolution and charted it in excel. We discussed the results and focused on what exactly about this format help them understand the process of evolution better.

Here are the details about my inquiry question and the interactive game.

How can you prove that a match or mismatch between an organism and its environment could lead to its evolution or extinction?

Please visit the following URL for data collection:

www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/evolution


This interactive is a game where the setting of the environment could be changed from green to orange and all shades in between. Against any of this background, are the green and orange bugs that are milling about. The object of the game is to see which bugs (green or orange) survive the predators at a particular time. The children would leave the buttons at one setting and print screen 10-15 times and counting up the bugs at any given point.

After the data is generated by the students, they plot it in excel. This is a good launching pad to discuss a number of topics in evolution including ideas like 'Why the number of orange bugs is dwindling when the background is green?' or 'Why the chances of endangered species multiplying again becomes a remote possibility in nature?'

I find that there a number of questions regarding evolution which children come to grips with only if they are exposed in a number of different ways to the concepts or else it becomes very difficult to understand them.

Notes for any teacher who wants to use this website:
1. Please use the word 'generation 1, generation 2………etc. as you print screen the game for data.

My evolution lesson and its self generated data are geared to promote understanding of the process of evolution. I consider it a sixth-seventh grade introduction to evolution using Excel. For my students it answered very small questions like how 'change over time' definition of evolution means generations of a single species in thousands and millions of years as opposed to the changes during metamorphosis time duration during a butterfly's life line. Why suitability to the environment is so crucial for any species? It also told them about the 'chancy' nature of evolution and that nothing predetermines which species would be most adapted in future. No one knows for sure how the environment would change.

I could not have done this lesson without the help of 'print screen' option on the keyboard to save the game screens and then tabulating the information. I feel the time that the children spent gathering this entertaining information was well spent. Now, I often hear that lesson as an example in other discussions as well. It has allowed children play time to think through a concept of value.

I realize that this is not a data set that remotely mimics the powerful data sets on certain web sites. However, this definitely was a good way tool for me to teach the children about a number of things in evolution.

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Jayanthi,

That site is great. It is very simple, but clearly demonstrates natural selection. I usually do something similar to that, but just with different colored paper - this is a little more exciting!

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