Letter for Students

Dear Student,

The purpose of this letter is to give you a few tips and suggestions to make sure that you have a good experience going through the lesson.

The lesson is not short, as it covers a broad area of subjects and tries to cover as many relevant topics as possible. The use of the actual Population applet or program doesn't start until about the middle of the lesson because it is important that you understand all the basics and how to use the program before you use it. Once you start using the program, you'll work on 10 different experiments, some of them pretty easy to allow you to learn the use of the program. Be patient, as it is certainly worth it to go through the entire lesson. The lesson gets better as you move forward.

Now a few specific tips:

  1. It is important to remember that the program does not work exactly as the real ecosystem does. There are some simplifications that are described in the facts pages in paragraphs that start with arrows like this:  
  2. When running the experiments you can look at the image of the trees and how they grow. You can then look at the tiny squirrels and the hawks. But as a scientist you really want to look at the numbers in the table and the shapes of the curves in the chart to start analyzing what is happening (or not happening) with the different populations.
  3. While running the experiments you can open and close both the table and the chart as many times as you want. Remember that you have this flexibility.
  4. Something else to be aware of (and this is explained in the instructions) is that the Y-axis scale changes based on how you setup the experiment. For example, 100% of acorns might represent 25,000 or only 500 acorns. Don't be confused if the curves of two different experiments look almost the same as they might represent completely different values. Always check the table and the maximum values in the chart.
  5. Be patient when loading or starting the program as it might take a while to load all it needs. Depending on your connection to the internet it might take anywhere from 10 seconds to about a minute.
  6. Lastly, when doing the experiments, you may want to repeat them several times without changing the setups. Like with real nature, the model does not always produce the same results.

Your feedback is very important to make sure that things work and make sense with this lesson. By providing feedback you might be helping other students, as I might incorporate into the lessons some of the feedback that I receive.

I do hope that you will enjoy this lesson while learning lots of new concepts and that you'll gain a deeper appreciation of the scientific world as well as the environment.

Sincerely,
Jacobo Bulaevsky

 

 


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Last Updated: Monday, 13-Nov-2000 05:22:04 GMT


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