Alien species: finish your first species, thinking especially about: habitat, predator/prey, and sense organs. Then create a second species so that one or both species is dependant on the other. They would both be part of an ECOSYSTEM. Research what that word means.
Cell structure exercise – quick and not difficult but you might need to search on Bitesize or elsewhere to find out some of the answers
Questions on environment and energy – if you want something else to try as well
Predator/Prey exercise: download worksheet
Watch this Cognito video on Ecology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVD5izWXmKo
Takes notes if you can.
Question for discussion: ‘is it possible to call yourself an environmentalist of you spend your whole life killing thousands of animals for fun?’
Mutation Game– play it, you can also adapt and evolve the game with your own rules
Easter science home learning: Research these 4 people: Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein. What did each contribute to the development of science? Was Aristotle a scientist? Did Einstein prove Newton wrong? Write down your findings for a presentation in the first lesson back at the hub.
Bonus optional super-fun questions:
When did modern science begin? Why is it ending? (actually that’s a trick question but the answer could be ‘because lots of people will believe any old codswallop they find on the internet’). Discuss! What was Aristotle’s first name anyway? Did an apple actually fall on Isaac’s head and did Galileo actually drop things off the leaning tower of Pisa? What was Einstein’s biggest mistake? If you drop 2 metal balls from the leaning tower of Pisa, both the same size and shinyness but one weighs 1 kg and one weighs 10kg, which one hits the ground (or Newton’s head) first? But…but…but…why??
If you didn’t get a chance to complete the atom worksheet, please have a go at that too, here:
Welcome to the Hub 2 science page! I will post links (in the yellow box) to useful or interesting resources and will also add some home learning (pink box) to complete between lessons. I will try to add an easier and a more challenging option each time. There’s also an ongoing project in green at the bottom of the page. The home learning is optional but I would strongly encourage everyone to spend a bit of time at home each week finding out more about science for three reasons:
- We will spend our whole lives in the material (natural) world, so it’s handy to know some things about how it all works.
- It’s amazing and beautiful and fascinating too!
- You will be expected to take at least 2 GCSEs in science in just a few short years. Get started now and you will find it much much easier.
What is science? Most people think that it’s lots of information about things, like what you see in the GCSE books, but this is not really correct.
Science is a SYSTEM for discovering more about NATURE.
This is the most important thing to remember. All that stuff in the books is the information that this system has given us, it’s not what sience is. All this information can seem overwhelming because there is soooo much of it… Don’t worry, everyone feels like that at the start. Try to get the basics and you will understand enough of the rest, bit by bit. It’s OK to not understand and to feel confused, in fact it’s great because then we ask questions and questions are what it’s all about. ASK QUESTIONS!
How science usually works:
- look at the world, find something that you don’t understand and ask questions about it.
- Use your imagination to creatively suggest a possible explanation.
- EXPERIMENT! Test the world and get some results.
- Decide if your results fit your suggestion. Either way is a result and we have learned something.
- If it does fit, design some more experiments to check it and get other people to do the same experiements and compare results.
- Ask lots of other scientists to try to prove you wrong! If they can’t, you might be on to something.
- It will usually take a long time and thousands of experiements before we can say that your idea has been proven to be right.
Hub 2 science
For the first few lessons we will be going right back to the basics: what is science? Why do we study it? Just what is the material world made up of anyway? (3 things, as far as we know…). What’s inside these pesky atoms and just who do these cheeky Neutrino’s think they are and why are there 100 billion of them passing through my thumbnail every second? How many forces are there, actually? What’s the point of ‘strange’ and ‘charm’ quarks if we never see them? (Don’t worry, we never need to talk about quarks again).
We will look at how the ancients tried to make sense of our world, the birth of the scientific method, the potential death of science and the difference between what we know and what is still being discovered. Mostly we will be thinking about questions and what they are for. Think about these ones:
- Why doesn’t the moon come crashing onto the earth? Will it ever?
- How does a spinning windmill produce electricity?
- If positive and negative charges attract, then why don’t electrons just collide into the nucleus of every atom?
- What on earth is going on with these Neutrinos anyway?
- Will everything in the universe get sucked into black holes?
- If everything in your cell cannot be called ‘living’ then how is your cell ‘alive’? How are you alive, if you are just made out of ‘dead’ stuff?
PROJECT: My Alien World
Most of Hub 2 have already designed an alien world with strange species on it. This project is ongoing; we will add features to our worlds when we cover different subjects, and when we come to learn more about Biology we will create a whole ecosystem. Next week we will spend some time listening to presentations (optional) from Hub 2 about their worlds, so you can add any more details this week, or leave it for now if you are happy with it.
Designing a world: think about climate, species, dangers, habitats, seasons, planetary neighbours (sun/s, moons, other planets, solar system, galaxy). Our worlds can be as fantastical as you like and do NOT have to possible in our universe. But just like a story it’s good if they make some kind of sense.