By: Vanessa Gallagher, Kait McLaughlin, Bianca Fiorini, Malina Manhas

Build Your Own Ecosystem

Description

Students will use Scratch to create their own ecosystem for a living organism. This will include one main organism living in the ecosystem, set as your Sprite. Students will also include an appropriate background where they might find their organism, as well as biotic and abiotic factors (food, drink, predators, and any other aspects to consider). In the end, students will have created an ecosystem for their animal Sprite, and have it complete actions relevant to the daily life of the animal.

Introduction

1. Show pictures of various ecosystems (desert, rainforest, swamp) and ask the students sample questions – what would happen if you took out one animal? What if the weather suddenly changed? Can you think of two animals who depend upon each other to survive in this ecosystem?
2. Ask students if they were able to control it, how would it be designed? How would they make the animals interact? What would they eat?
3. Explain that in today’s class, they will be doing exactly that. Introduce the topic of using Scratch to create an interactive ecosystem that reflects a real-world scenario.
4. Provide students with access to the frog ecosystem code above as an example of what their finished project

Working on it

1. Students will begin by choosing their animal Sprite, and picking out a suitable background environment that the animal could realistically live in
2. Students will incorporate other elements into their code, including their Sprite moving to food and water sources to fulfill its daily needs (making additional Sprite’s may be the easiest way for students to complete this)
3. Students will incorporate at least one additional animal into their ecosystem in the form of a predator or prey, and show how their animal might evade the predator in order to survive or hunt their prey for sustenance
4. Add any finishing touches such as sounds or other relevant environmental factors, as well as any specific functions or new coding blocks you would like them to use

Consolidation

1. Ask students to share some new coding functions they used today for the first time, and what they were able to create with them. Ask what grade level they were able to reach with their code (grade 1 – sequential events, grade 3 – repeating events, grade 6 – efficient code, etc.)
2. Students who are comfortable sharing their ecosystems may do so, and have students wander around the classroom going to different desks and exploring the different ecosystems their peers created (or connect the computer to the projector and go through students’ code as a class)

Resource information

Tags: Ecosystem, Biology, Science, Scratch

Main Subject: Science

Other Integrated Subjects: Coding

Grade(s): 7

Learning to Code: Yes

Coding to Learn: Yes

URL Link to Code: Link to the Frog Ecosystem Code

URL Link to Code: Link to the Froggy <<33 Code