Week 1

First, I wanted to share how impressed I was with things I saw in class - good thinking, good questions, good notes, careful observations - these are all good scientific habits of mind!

This week's class was about science as a process.  Many times we think science is a bunch of facts and equations - a huge bank of information, but in reality, science is a process used to understand and explain the world around us.  We call it The Scientific Method

We spent some time in the "field" making observations of a plot.  We didn't get very far, and really that was the point.  Science is a process that takes time, diligent effort, and sufficient information to make it viable.  I recommend following up and reading this page - if you can read and understand it then you know you've got a good grasp on what science is and the process it uses.


For next week, please read the section(s) in your text and do the microscope tutorial linked under Other Resources in the week 2 schedule.  All the links under Other Resources are valuable.  Our Week 2 Lab will focus on characteristics of life, use of the microscope, and powers of 10 related to magnification, scale, and scientific notation.

Here are those Other Resources (I added a few to help clarify things) for Week 2:

Microscope Tutorial *completing this beforehand will make our lab run much smoother*

Powers of Ten this foundation will help in understanding measurements, scale, magnification, and scientific notation

Negative Powers of Ten this will also help with measurements, scale, magnification, and scientific notation

More Powers of Ten this video gives you a visual idea of scale in powers of ten, from galaxies to the nucleus of an atom

Scientific Notation this is a brief explanation of scientific notation (something you really need to know in order to do scholar level science).  If you are working at a scholar level and this math is unfamiliar to you I recommend studying up on it - here are some instructional videos on the topic Basics, Add/Sub, Mult/Div (these are Advanced videos).  We won't use significant figures in our calculations, but that is also a very important math concept to know for science.

Cells alive looking at magnification powers of a microscope

Characteristics of Life (first 7:30 of the video) Some people categorize these characteristics differently (e.g. one might say taking in nutrients and giving off waste are two different characteristics while another might categorize them both under the one characteristic of metablolism) but how they define life is still the same.