Stimulating Understanding of Computational science through Collaboration, Exploration, Experiment, and Discovery for students with Hearing Impairments
a collaboration of the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf, Barton College, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and Interpreters, Inc.

For Teachers!

How to Weigh a Tree

Objectives: The students will gain an appreciation of their dynamic interaction in the carbon cycle. They will learn the role of trees in counterbalancing the CO₂ that people produce. 

This lesson will introduce the students to Computational Science. They will use computers and calculators to compute values that will help them understand the science of the carbon cycle. Computational Science is a powerful new way to do science.

National standards addressed:

Science 

THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF ORGANISMS 

-The atoms and molecules on the earth cycle among the living and nonliving components of the biosphere. 

-Living organisms have the capacity to produce populations of infinite size, but environments and resources are finite. This fundamental tension has profound effects on the interactions between organisms. 

-Human beings live within the world's ecosystems. Increasingly, humans modify ecosystems as a result of population growth, technology, and consumption. Human destruction of habitats through direct harvesting, pollution, atmospheric changes, and other factors is threatening current global stability, and if not addressed, ecosystems will be irreversibly affected. 

MATTER, ENERGY, AND ORGANIZATION IN LIVING SYSTEMS 

-The complexity and organization of organisms accommodates the need for obtaining, transforming, transporting, releasing, and eliminating the matter and energy used to sustain the organism. 

-As matter and energy flow through different levels of organization of living systems--cells, organs, organisms, communities--and between living systems and the physical environment, chemical elements are recombined in different ways. Each recombination results in storage and dissipation of energy into the environment as heat. Matter and energy are conserved in each change. 

NATURAL RESOURCES 

-Human populations use resources in the environment in order to maintain and improve their existence. Natural resources have been and will continue to be used to maintain human populations.  

-The earth does not have infinite resources; increasing human consumption places severe stress on the natural processes that renew some resources and it depletes those resources that cannot be renewed. 

ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY 

-Natural ecosystems provide an array of basic processes that affect humans. Those processes include maintenance of the quality of the atmosphere, generation of soils, control of the hydrologic cycle, disposal of wastes, and recycling of nutrients. Humans are changing many of these basic processes, and the changes may be detrimental to humans. 

-Materials from human societies affect both physical and chemical cycles of the earth. 

-Many factors influence environmental quality. Factors that students might investigate include population growth, resource use, population distribution, over consumption, the capacity of technology to solve problems, poverty, the role of economic, political, and religious views, and different ways humans view the earth. 

National Science Standards were taken from: http://www.nap.edu/html/nses/html/



Mathematics 

Formulate Questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer them. 

Use Visualization, spatial reasoning, and geometric modeling to solve problems. 

Use geometric models to gain insights into, and answer questions in, other areas of mathematics; 

Use geometric ideas to solve problems in, and gain insights into, other disciplines and other areas of interest such as art and architecture. 

Understand Measurable Attributes of objects and the units, systems, and processes of measurement. 

Make decisions about units and scales that are appropriate for problem situations involving measurement.

National Mathematics Standards were taken from:

http://standards.nctm.org/document/chapter7/index.htm

Developed by
The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.

Copyright © 1999-2001 by The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.

This project is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Science Foundation.