Your Mission

This is a community project. It means that communication with other teams is as important as creating innovations and products.

General Rules

The goal of this project is to develop a simulator of the behaviour of an Ecosystem that serves to demonstrate that your Company is able to construct such programs.

You will use the Open Office program Calc to construct this simulator. No technical information on Calc programming will be given; it's up to you to learn this.
You will work on teams, but you are allowed (and encouraged) to use the work of other teams. This is a collaborative project: your success is our success, and your failure is our success.
It is compulsory to share your work: when you get a milestone accomplished, you have to release your version.
You will publish your results and a Diary of the work of your Team.
If you are not able to reach a Milestone, you can begin from the work of another team. Take into account to respect the Licenses.

Milestones

The project is a gradual construction, following several steps. At each step, you will create a new Calc program. You have to include a License to your program, publish it in your platform and describe it in your Diary.

Milestone 1

Develop a simulator able to calculate the logistic growing of a population after one generation.

Entry Data: K, r, N0

Output: N1

Milestone 2

Develop a simulator able to reproduce the logistic growing of a population for 15 generations.

Entry Data: K, r, N0

Output: N1...N15

License to your program, publish it in your platform and describe it in your Diary.

Milestone 3

As in the previous step, but do it for 8 different species in parallel, and with 8 graphs plotting independently the growing curve.

Identify the names of the species, and classify 2 species as producers, 2 as primary consumers, 2 as secondary consumers, and 2 as tertiary consumers.

Milestone 4

As in the previous step, but your simulator has to calculate also the Kg of biomass for each generation for each species, and plot it in the same graph of the growing curve.

Assumption: Each species has a number of Kg per individual = 2/r

Milestone 5

Your simulator has to build a Biomass pyramid. Plot the Biomass pyramids for all the 15 generations.

Milestone 6

Your simulator has to incorporate new Entry Data Fields:

Total amount (in grams) of Oxygen in the ecosystem
Total amount of Carbon Dioxide (in grams) in the ecosystem

These values should be recalculated and plotted together for each generation.

Milestone 7

Include predation for the calculation of the population from one generation to the next one. Set it as an Entry Data: the predation rate = number of individuals predated / individuals hunting. Assume that each stage of the biomass pyramid predates only the previous one. Find the parameters to avoid the extinction of any species.

Milestone 8

Each team can choose which goal wants to develop for this step. Some ideas: including water constraints in the ecosystem, aplying interspecific ecological relationships (predation, parasitism, simbiosis,..), calculating changes on r or K depending on the circumstances of the environment (water, Oxygen, biomass of the previous stage,...). Specify on your Diary and Files page the goals you have tried to develop.

Team Duties

To keep a Diary of the work of each session (both Team or Expert Sessions). The diary must contain the problems encountered, the proposed solutions and the results obtained.
To develop a Calc Program, following the standards and the proposed milestones.
To publish a File for each Milestone, correctly Licensed and with information about if it is a Beta (provisional, not tested) or a Release (Definitive, tested).

Referència bibliogràfica

Aprenentatge Basat en Projectes, Treballs pràctics i Controvèrsies. 28 experiències i reflexions per a ensenyar Ciències.
Rosa Sensat: Barcelona (2019). Jordi Domènech Casal.

Introducció [Llegir la introducció en obert de l'edició en castellà]

De què parlem quan parlem de competència científica.
Ensenyar a investigar. Indagació i treballs pràctics.
Ensenyar a pensar. Habilitats de raonament científic.
Aprendre ciència usant la ciència. Aprenentatge Basat en Projectes.
El mètode d'estudi de cas dirigit. Aprenentatge Basat en Problemes.
Compendre, decidir i actuar. Scitizenship i controvèrsies sòcio-científiques.
Ciència en un món incert. Naturalesa de la Ciència i Pseudociències.

Es pot adquirir a: Rosa Sensat