By Eva Brandis, Alexa Funahashi, Carina Masters, and Marilynn Hunt
This was a very long, but enjoyable project. The final product was to create a cladogram and evolution story for a bunch of hardware tools. In order to understand all the concepts necessary to do this, we did multiple mini projects within it. This project taught me a lot, such as what a cladogram is, how speciation works, and much more.
Content
Adaptation: a changed trait to make an organism better suit its environment
(We needed to understand what adaptations are because they are the start of evolution.)
Cladogram: a diagram that shows the common characteristics between species
(Our hardware tools were organized on a cladogram.)
Evolution: the process, in which living organisms develop and diversify over time from earlier forms
(We created evolution an evolution story for our hardware tools.)
Natural Selection: variation, competition, survival, and then reproduction in a species; Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin
(An important part of how evolution works.)
Speciation: the formation of new species through evolution
(We needed to understand this term in order to understand how evolution works and we used it to create our evolution story.)
Taxonomy: the classification of organisms
(We created a taxonomy for an animal species.)
(We needed to understand what adaptations are because they are the start of evolution.)
Cladogram: a diagram that shows the common characteristics between species
(Our hardware tools were organized on a cladogram.)
Evolution: the process, in which living organisms develop and diversify over time from earlier forms
(We created evolution an evolution story for our hardware tools.)
Natural Selection: variation, competition, survival, and then reproduction in a species; Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin
(An important part of how evolution works.)
Speciation: the formation of new species through evolution
(We needed to understand this term in order to understand how evolution works and we used it to create our evolution story.)
Taxonomy: the classification of organisms
(We created a taxonomy for an animal species.)
Reflection
I think that this project went really well. My group finished with time to spare, so we created a video for our evolution story. A couple of things that I think my group did well were time management and creativity. We stuck to our schedule and had an extra day left to work. We do need to work on our productivity though. Even though we finished early, our group was not always on task. We got distracted talking or drawing. Our group could also work on organization because the classifications for our hardware tools were all over in different people's notebooks. It made it hard to create our slideshow. I had fun doing this project. Out of all the projects this year, so far I think that this one has taught me the most. I learned a lot of new terminology and theories.