Students are introduced to the classification of animals and animal interactions. Students also learn why engineers need to know about animals and how they use that knowledge to design technologies that help other animals and/or humans. This lesson is part of a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

Students learn about energy flow in food webs, including the roles of the sun, producers, consumers and decomposers in the energy cycle. They model a food web and create diagrams of food webs using their own drawings and/or images from nature or wildlife magazines. Students investigate the links between the sun, plants and animals, building their understanding of the web of nutrient dependency and energy transfer.

Students learn about energy and nutrient flow in various biosphere climates and environments. They learn about herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, food chains and food webs, seeing the interdependence between producers, consumers and decomposers. Students are introduced to the roles of the hydrologic (water), carbon, and nitrogen cycles in sustaining the worlds' ecosystems so living organisms survive. This lesson is part of a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

This 5th grade unit will take about 8 weeks, 25.5 hours to complete. Students plan and carry out an original investigation in which they observe the effect of different types of matter on the growth of plants. They create their own observable question with prompting such as: “What type of matter do you think will affect plants’ growth?” or “Do you think the amount of a particular type of matter will affect how the plant grows?” They observe their experiment over a period of seven days (or longer if time allows). At the conclusion of the investigation, students use their data to explain how plants convert matter (gas and liquid) into plant matter.

This 5th grade unit will take about 8 weeks, 25.5 hours to complete. Students plan and carry out an original investigation in which they observe the effect of different types of matter on the growth of plants. They create their own observable question with prompting such as: “What type of matter do you think will affect plants’ growth?” or “Do you think the amount of a particular type of matter will affect how the plant grows?” They observe their experiment over a period of seven days (or longer if time allows). At the conclusion of the investigation, students use their data to explain how plants convert matter (gas and liquid) into plant matter.

Students will participate travel from station to station modeling how nitrogen cycles through an ecosystem. This is relevant for students to understand how the matter on earth is finite (conservation of matter), but it can be transferred from place to place and in different forms. Nitrogen is a vital component of life and how we live.

Students are introduced to the concept of a dam and its potential benefits, which include water supply, electricity generation, flood control, recreation and irrigation. This lesson begins an ongoing classroom scenario in which student engineering teams working for the Splash Engineering firm design dams for a fictitious client, Thirsty County.