Alternate Assignment: Monday, June 3 to Wednesday, June 5

If you are not able to participate in the invasive removal project Monday to Wednesday, you will complete an alternate assignment.

Below is a link to an article by famous food/nature writer Michael Pollan about our microbiome—the bacteria that inhabit our body, outnumber our own cells many times over, and are critical to our digestive health and many other aspects of our physiology. To get to the article, click on the link below:

Pollan: Microbiome Article, NY Times Magazine

Your job is to:

1. Read the article (all 8 pages)
2. Take notes about aspects of the article that are interesting to you or generally important
3. Do a little background research to understand some of the ideas better 
4. And create a short presentation (≈ 4-5 minutes) about the author and the content of his article on Powerpoint/googledocs/Prezi/etc., to present to your classmates on finals day (Thursday or Friday)

Friday, May 31: Alternate Assignment

Below are two links to official government websites about invasive species in the state of Oregon.

Your task:  1. Choose one of the websites and dig deeply into a topic that interests you (like invasive species on tsunami debris) and look up articles or information that add onto this knowledge OR  2. Look through both sites and compare and contrast the type of information presented and the way it's presented.

Submit your response as a comment to this post. For full credit, it should be well-written and several paragraphs long, and you should cite all sources you use in your submission.

 Oregon Fish & Wildlife Invasives Page

Oregon Invasive Species Council

Invasive Species—Days 1 & 2

Here's the link to the video we're watching in class Weds & Thursday on invasive species in Oregon:

The Silent Invasion

Engineering Design Work Sample

Writing up the Work Sample: Due Thursday, May 23

You will write up all the work from your dichotomous key-making, testing, and refining as an official work sample following the State of Oregon's rubric for engineering design, which Mr. Herlands has provided you with a copy of.

To achieve a passing score, you must receive a score of 4 or higher in each of the 4 categories of the rubric. To do this, your work sample should be written using scientific language, and it should answer each of the topics below with enough description to show what you have done and what you have learned. You may use all available resources when writing up your work sample—all your work before and during the activity, any handouts from the teacher, and online resources that help you with background ideas or conclusions.

**Note: All submissions on the work sample must be your own; handouts given to you by the teacher are meant as a guide, but they do not replace you creating and handing in your own unique work.**

Topics that must be addressed, and some questions to help you focus your thoughts:

• IDENTIFY PROBLEM: Describe the problem you were trying to solve.
          *What is a dichotomous key? What is it used for? How is it similar to other kinds of trees, like phylogenetic trees or family trees, that we studied? What are conifers, how many were used, and did you use the whole trees or just a part?

• RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Describe background research that helped you design a solution.
           *You worked through a dichotomous key of some of these same conifers earlier.

• DETERMINE CRITERIA AND CONSTRAINTS: Describe the criteria and constraints that affected your design solution.
          *What are the rules of making a dichotomous key? (dichotomy= 2 groups) What are the difficulties of dividing a large number of things into only 2 groups?

• DESIGN SOLUTION: Accurately and precisely draw and label your design solution.
          *Your first key and your second re-designed key are to be neatly drawn out on an 8.5"x11" paper.

• TEST SOLUTION: Record data and observations gathered while testing of your design solution.
          *Show data in clear and appropriate format. Chart/table of results is required, additional graphical or other visual analysis improves this section.

• EVALUATE SOLUTION: Describe the strengths and weaknesses of your design.
          *Use your data as evidence to answer the prompt above. Which dichotomies were most successful and which were least successful for your testers, and why did this appear to be the case? Did you anticipate these problems when you were making the key (were they the hardest dichotomies to create), or were testers' struggles with them a surprise? Explain. This is your opportunity for reflection on the process of making a key

• IDENTIFY IMPROVEMENTS: Describe at least 2 changes that would improve your design or solve the problem in a different way.
          *Which areas did you choose to re-design, and why? Be descriptive. How did you go about this process with your partner(s)?

• REDESIGN SOLUTION: Accurately and precisely draw and label your redesign solution. Describe results of second round of testing, including difficulties and successes and/or failures in your re-design.
          *Then, describe at least 2 changes you would make to improve your design for a third round of testing, and why those changes are needed.

Scoring the Work Sample

To view examples of work samples that meet (scores of 4), exceed (5-6), or don't meet (< 4) the standards, click on the following link, go to the bottom of the page, and select any of the high school examples and scoring descriptions in each category. We looked at the "Circadian Rhythms" HIGH score shown below in class. Note that it is an inquiry work sample, not an engineering design, so it is scored and written differently than you will write yours.

Work Samples & Scoring

Here's the official State of Oregon rubric/scoring guide for your work sample:

Extra Credit Opportunity: Presentation

As in previous trimesters, you can do an extra credit project on a biology topic you're particularly interested in. You must get pre-approval by the teacher before beginning (to determine the appropriateness of the project focus and depth), but the difference is that this trimester all projects must be submitted as presentations to the whole class, not simply as a paper. Presentations must be pre-screened by the teacher before presented in front of the whole class (so, no last-minute extra credit can done on the last day of school).

You can earn up to 10 points added to a test or quiz score. The presentation will be scored according to the following categories:

Presentation skills (5): Length (2), Overall Quality (2), References (1)

Biology (5): Accuracy (2), Depth (2), Appropriate vocabulary (1)

Please talk to Mr. Herlands as soon as possible if you are considering doing an extra credit project.

Good luck!

Evolution Unit: Study Guide

The evolution unit test is on Wednesday.

Here's the study guide, due on Wednesday as well:

Linnaeus & Taxonomy

Here are the powerpoint pages of notes from Tuesday's short lecture about Linneaus and his system of classifying species into groups based on levels of similarity: