Suggestions activities for the classroom
- Ask students to make a list of systems. Who has the longest list after 5 min?
- Discuss paradigm shifting as progress in science.
- Trace the energy flow though any system.
- How is a city like an organism?
- Elicit the common characteristics of all systems.
- Using a windmill as an example discuss how the parts are interconnected so that it functions as a whole.
- Repeat the above with a toilet, water supply, reserve tank, control mechanism, and waste system as parts.
- Melt sodium thiosulfate in a test tube to a clear liquid. Cool in a water bath. Induce rapid crystallization by scratching the inside of the test tube or dropping a crystal in. Feel the heat released. Energy flow.
- Discuss heat zones in a candle flame, a dynamic system.
- Examine how is self-organization is related to the origin of life.
- In what way are ant nests and bee hives systems?
- Describe the Stanley Miller/Harold Urey experiment as a system.
- Play a video clip of Benard cells forming in heated cooking oil.
- Discuss, or better demonstrate, a chemical clock system.
- Demonstrate the B/Z chemical reaction system which self-organizes radiating circles of color.
- Get standing wave structures in water by rubbing the edge of a wine glass or applying vibration to an aluminum pan with powder
- Turn your students on to the Mandelbrot Set via the Internet's many sites. The most fascinating mathematical system in the world.
- Ask why a sports team is a like a system. Team spirit is a emergent.
- Point out that mood is an emergent of music.
- Ask why it is called a weather system. What are parts of a tornado?
- Discuss the social structure of your community. Does a pecking order structure emerge?
- Have students test a needle floating on paper Then rub the needle with a magnet. Does it now act as a compass? The new magnet field of the needle is an emergent.
- Ask the students what they think Heraclitus meant when he said, You cannot step into the same river twice.
- Look at an egg as a system. Have the students describe its properties. If it is broken into a pan and heat is added what are the new properties? Ask where the new properties came from?
- Put a copy of the diagram on Page 49 on the chalkboard. Ask the students what it is trying to say,
- Discuss feedbacks, positive and negative. Ask for examples.
- In a review of the interior structure of the cell have the students explain the function of each of the parts. Ask them to explain how Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts applies.
- Ask if there is a ethnic neighborhood in town. How was it organized? Who did it?
- Discuss the operation of a laser. What emerges?
- Be sure the students understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It can be stated in different ways:
- There is no free lunch.
- You can't even break even.
- If you think things are mixed up now, just wait.
- It's all downhill.
- Entropy isn't what it used to be.
- Disorder awful but lawful.
- It all levels out.
- Breaking up is not hard to do.
- The 2nd Law makes mountains into molehills.