OpenSciEd

How does a one-way mirror work? Though most everyone knows that one-way mirrors exist, having students model how they work turns out to be a very effective way to develop their thinking about how visible light travels and how we see images. Initial student models in this 6th grade light and matter science unit reveal a wide variety of ideas and explanations that motivate the unit investigations that help students figure out what is going on and lead them to a deeper understanding of the world around them.

A video of an experience with a one-way mirror, gets students to organize and write down their initial ideas and then they dig in to test those ideas and figure out what is really happening. Students build a scaled box model of what they saw in the video to test out their ideas. Using two boxes combined together with a one-way mirror in between the two, students vary the presence of light in the two boxes to figure out how a one-way mirror works and improve their initial models so they accurately explain how light is reflected and transmitted through materials and the basics of how these behaviors of light result in the images we see.

As the first 6th grade science unit in the OpenSciEd program, during the course of this unit, students also develop the foundation for classroom norms for collaboration that will be important across the whole program while answering several questions.

What keeps different cups or containers from warming up or cooling down? Students begin this 6th grade science unit by experimenting whether a new plastic cup sold by a store keeps a drink colder for longer than the regular plastic cup that comes free with the drink. Students find that the drink in the regular cup warms up more than the drink in the special cup. This prompts students to identify features of the cups that are different, such as the lid, walls, and hole for the straw, that might explain why one drink warms up more than the other.

In this 6th grade science unit, students investigate the different cup features they conjecture to explain the phenomenon, starting with the lid. They model how matter can enter or exit the cup via evaporation. However, they find that in a completely closed system, the liquid inside the cup still changes temperature. This motivates the need to trace the transfer of energy into the drink as it warms up. Through a series of lab investigations and simulations, students find two ways to transfer energy into the drink: (1) the absorption of light and (2) thermal energy from the warmer air around the drink. They are then challenged to design their own drink container that can perform as well as the store-bought container, following a set of design criteria and constraints.

This 6th grade science unit on weather, climate, and water cycling is broken into four separate lesson sets. In the first two lesson sets, students explain small-scale storms. In the third and fourth lesson sets, students explain mesoscale weather systems and climate-level patterns of precipitation. Each of these two parts of the unit is grounded in a different anchoring phenomenon.

The unit starts out with anchoring students in the exploration of a series of videos of hailstorms from different locations across the country at different times of the year. The videos show that pieces of ice of different sizes (some very large) are falling out of the sky, sometimes accompanied by rain and wind gusts, all on days when the temperature of the air outside remained above freezing for the entire day. These cases spark questions and ideas for investigations, such as investigating how ice can be falling from the sky on a warm day, how clouds form, why some clouds produce storms with large amounts of precipitation and others don’t, and how all that water gets into the air in the first place.

Mountains move! And there are ocean fossils on top of Mt. Everest! In this plate tectonics and rock cycling unit, students come to see that the Earth is much more active and alive than they have thought before. The unit launches with documentation of a 2015 Himalayan earthquake that shifted Mt. Everest suddenly to the southwest direction. Students also discover that Mt. Everest is steadily moving to the northeast every year and getting taller as well. Students wonder what could cause an entire mountain to move during an earthquake.

Students investigate other locations that are known to have earthquakes and they notice landforms, such as mountains and ridges that correspond to earthquake patterns. They read texts, explore earthquake and landform patterns using a data visualization tool, and study GPS data at these locations. Students develop an Earth model and study mantle convection motion to explain how Earth’s surface could move from processes below the surface. From this, students develop models to explain different ways plates collide and spread apart, ultimately explaining how Mt. Everest could move all the time in one direction, and also suddenly, in a backward motion, during an earthquake. The unit ends with students using what they have figured out about uplift and erosion to explain how a fossil was found at Mt. Everest without having to dig for it.

This unit begins with students experiencing, through text and video, a devastating natural event that caused major flooding in coastal towns of Japan. This event was the 2011 Great Sendai or Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami that caused major loss of life and property in Japan. Through this anchoring phenomenon, students think about ways to detect tsunamis, warn people, and reduce damage from the wave. As students design solutions to solve this problem, they begin to wonder about the natural hazard itself: what causes it, where it happens, and how it causes damage. 

The first part of the unit focuses on identifying where tsunamis occur, how they form, how they move across the ocean, and what happens as they approach shore. The second part of the unit transitions students to consider combinations of engineering design solutions and technologies to mitigate the effects of tsunamis. Finally, students apply their understanding to consider how to communicate about another natural hazard to stakeholders in a community.

This unit launches with students hearing about an injury that happened to a middle school student that caused him to need stitches, pins, and a cast. They analyze doctor reports and develop an initial model for what is going on in our body when it heals. Students investigate what the different parts of our body are made of, from the macro scale to the micro scale. They figure out parts of our body are made of cells and that these cells work together for our body to function.

Once students have figured out what their bodies are made of and how the parts of their body work together to be able to move, they wonder how the parts of our body heal. They start by watching a timelapse of a knee scrape and notice that over time the part that was scraped is filled in with new skin cells. Students investigate what happens when cells make more cells, what cells need to make more cells, and how cells get what they need to make more cells. Students return to the healing timeline they made at the start of the unit and apply what they have figured out about the interactions between the different systems in the body to explain the various events of healing that took place for the injury at the start of the unit. Finally, they apply their model for healing to explain growth at growth plates in children's bodies as they become adults.

To pique 7th grade students’ curiosity and anchor the learning for the unit in the visible and concrete, students start with an experience of observing and analyzing a bath bomb as it fizzes and eventually disappears in the water. Their observations and questions about what is going on drive learning that digs into a series of related phenomena as students iterate and improve their models depicting what happens during chemical reactions for middle school science. By the end of the unit, students have a firm grasp on how to model simple molecules, know what to look for to determine if chemical reactions have occurred, and apply their knowledge to chemical reactions to show how mass is conserved when atoms are rearranged.

In this 21-day unit, students are introduced to the anchoring phenomenon—a flameless heater in a Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) that provides hot food to people by just adding water. In the first lesson set, students explore the inside of an MRE flameless heater, then do investigations to collect evidence to support the idea that this heater and another type of flameless heater (a single-use hand warmer) are undergoing chemical reactions as they get warm. Students have an opportunity to reflect on the engineering design process, defining stakeholders, and refining the criteria and constraints for the design solution.

In the second lesson set, students develop their design solutions by investigating how much food and reactants they should include in their homemade heater designs and go through a series of iterative testing and redesigning. This iterative design cycle includes peer feedback, consideration of design modification consequences, and analysis of impacts on stakeholders. Finally, students optimize their designs and have another team test their homemade heater instructions.

This unit on metabolic reactions in the human body starts out with students exploring a real case study of a middle-school girl named M’Kenna, who reported some alarming symptoms to her doctor. Her symptoms included an inability to concentrate, headaches, stomach issues when she eats, and a lack of energy for everyday activities and sports that she used to play regularly. She also reported noticeable weight loss over the past few months, in spite of consuming what appeared to be a healthy diet. Her case sparks questions and ideas for investigations around trying to figure out which pathways and processes in M’Kenna’s body might be functioning differently than a healthy system and why.

Students investigate data specific to M’Kenna’s case in the form of doctor’s notes, endoscopy images and reports, growth charts, and micrographs. They also draw from their results from laboratory experiments on the chemical changes involving the processing of food and from digital interactives to explore how food is transported, transformed, stored, and used across different body systems in all people. Through this work of figuring out what is causing M’Kenna’s symptoms, the class discovers what happens to the food we eat after it enters our bodies and how M’Kenna’s different symptoms are connected.

This unit on the cycling of matter and photosynthesis begins with 7th grade students reflecting on what they ate for breakfast. Students are prompted to consider where their food comes from and consider which breakfast items might be from plants. Then students taste a common breakfast food, maple syrup, and see that according to the label, it is 100% from a tree.

Based on the preceding unit, students argue that they know what happens to the sugar in syrup when they consume it. It is absorbed into the circulatory system and transported to cells in their body to be used for fuel. Students explore what else is in food and discover that food from plants, like bananas, peanut butter, beans, avocado, and almonds, not only have sugars but proteins and fats as well. This discovery leads them to wonder how plants are getting these food molecules and where a plant’s food comes from.

Students figure out that they can trace all food back to plants, including processed and synthetic food. They obtain and communicate information to explain how matter gets from living things that have died back into the system through processes done by decomposers. Students finally explain that the pieces of their food are constantly recycled between living and nonliving parts of a system.

This unit on ecosystem dynamics and biodiversity begins with students reading headlines that claim that the future of orangutans is in peril and that the purchasing of chocolate may be the cause. Students then examine the ingredients in popular chocolate candies and learn that one of these ingredients--palm oil--is grown on farms near the rainforest where orangutans live. This prompts students to develop initial models to explain how buying candy could impact orangutans.

Students spend the first lesson set better understanding the complexity of the problem, which cannot be solved with simple solutions. They will figure out that palm oil is derived from the oil palm trees that grow near the equator, and that these trees are both land-efficient and provide stable income for farmers, factors that make finding a solution to the palm oil problem more challenging. Students will establish the need for a better design for oil palm farms, which will support both orangutans and farmers. The final set of lessons engage students in investigations of alternative approaches to growing food compared to large-scale monocrop farms. Students work to design an oil palm farm that simultaneously supports orangutan populations and the income of farmers and community members.

This unit on Earth’s resources and human impact begins with students observing news stories and headlines of drought and flood events across the United States. Students figure out that these drought and flood events are not normal and that both kinds of events seem to be related to rising temperatures. This prompts them to develop an initial model to explain how rising temperatures could cause both droughts and floods and leads students to wonder what could cause rising temperatures, too. This initial work sets students up to ask questions related to the query: How do changes in Earth’s system impact our communities and what can we do about it?

Students spend the first lesson set gathering evidence for how a change in temperature affects evaporation, precipitation, and other parts of Earth’s water system. They use evidence to support a scientific explanation that two climate variables (temperature and precipitation) are changing precipitation patterns in the case sites they investigated. Students figure out that the rising temperatures are caused by an imbalance in Earth’s carbon system, resulting in a variety of problems in different communities. The unit ends with students evaluating different kinds of solutions to these problems and how they are implemented in communities. Students work through a systematic evaluation process to consider (1) each solution’s potential to solve the carbon imbalance, (2) tradeoffs associated with solutions based on student-identified constraints, and (3) whether the solution in question makes sense for their community’s stakeholders.

Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”

Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.

In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.

They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.

This unit launches with a slow-motion video of a speaker as it plays music. In the previous unit, students developed a model of sound. This unit allows students to investigate the cause of a speaker’s vibration in addition to the effect.

Students dissect speakers to explore the inner workings, and engineer homemade cup speakers to manipulate the parts of the speaker. They identify that most speakers have the same parts–a magnet, a coil of wire, and a membrane. Students investigate each of these parts to figure out how they work together in the speaker system. Along the way, students manipulate the components (e.g. changing the strength of the magnet, number of coils, direction of current) to see how this technology can be modified and applied to a variety of contexts, like MagLev trains, junkyard magnets, and electric motors.

Humans have always been driven by noticing, recording, and understanding patterns and by trying to figure out how we fit within much larger systems. In this unit, students begin observing the repeating biannual pattern of the Sun setting perfectly aligned between buildings in New York City along particular streets and then try to explain additional patterns in the sky that they and others have observed. Students draw on their own experiences and the stories of family or community members to brainstorm a list of patterns in the sky. And listen to a series of podcasts highlighting indigenous astronomies from around the world that emphasize how patterns in the sky set the rhythms for their lives, their communities, and all life on Earth, and these are added to their growing list of related phenomena (other patterns in the sky people have observed).

In the first two lesson sets (Lessons 1–5 and 6–7), students develop models for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Sun-Moon systems that explain some of the patterns in the sky that they have identified, including seasons, eclipses, and lunar phases. In the third lesson set (Lessons 8–12), students investigate a series of related phenomena motivated by their questions and ideas for investigations. In the final lesson set (Lessons 13–17), students explore the remaining questions on their Driving Question Board, related to planets and other objects farther out in space (beyond the stars they can see with the unaided eye).

This unit on genetics starts out with students noticing and wondering about photos of two cattle, one of whom has significantly more muscle than the other. The students then observe photos of other animals with similar differences in musculature: dogs, fish, rabbits, and mice. After developing initial models for the possible causes of these differences in musculature, students explore a collection of photos showing a range of visible differences.

In the first lesson set, students use videos, photos, data sets, and readings to investigate what causes an animal to get extra-big muscles. Students figure out how muscles typically develop as a result of environmental factors such as exercise and diet. Then, students work with cattle pedigrees, including data about chromosomes and proteins, to figure out genetic factors that influence the heavily muscled phenotype and explore selective breeding in cattle. In the second lesson set, students use what they’ve learned from explaining cattle musculature to help them explain other trait variations they’ve seen. They investigate plant reproduction, including selective breeding and asexual reproduction (in plants and other organisms) and other examples of traits that are influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Students figure out that environmental and genetic factors together play a role in the differences we see among living things.

At the beginning of this unit, students hear about the surprising fossil of an ancient penguin (nicknamed “Pedro”) in a podcast from the researchers who found and identified the fossil. Students analyze data about modern penguins and Pedro to develop initial explanations for how these penguins could be connected. They brainstorm about 1) Where did all the ancient penguins go? 2) Where did all the different species of modern penguins come from? and 3) What other organisms alive today might also be connected to organisms that lived long ago?

After exploring variations in body structures and behaviors in modern penguins and ancient penguins, they also analyze data from ancient and modern species of horses, whales, and horseshoe crabs to see whether these organisms have similar patterns. Then, to figure out the cause of the changes they have observed in populations, students explore more recent cases of changing heritable trait distribution in populations and explain them by developing a model for natural selection.

In the last part of the unit, students use their model for natural selection to explain how some body structure variations in different species of modern penguins could result from natural selection and how they could descend from a common ancient ancestor penguin population. They analyze embryological data to their argument supporting how different species may be connected. Finally, students take stock of all the questions they answered in this unit and previous OpenSciEd units and identify questions they look forward to figuring out in high school.