For this project, we learned about evolution through making a cladogram of nails and screws. We built a long evolutionary story that showed how the bits and pieces formed and evolved. It connected all of the hardware pieces together and explained why and how the evolution happened. First, we split up all of the hardware pieces or "fossils" into groups based on traits like ridges, circular, or plastic. Then, we sorted the pieces into more specified traits like size and color. Finally, we made a cladogram in which it showed the relationship between all of the organisms.
Physics Concepts
Evolution: the process through which organisms have changed to diversify themselves from earlier organisms
Adaptation: a change in an organism
Speciation: creation of a new species through processes like temporal isolation, geographic isolation, and reproduction isolation
Natural selection: the process in which some members of a species have variations, and they survive and reproduce to pass on those beneficial traits
Artificial selection: artificial breeding to create organisms with desired traits
Cladogram: a tree diagram showing relationships between organisms
Adaptation: a change in an organism
Speciation: creation of a new species through processes like temporal isolation, geographic isolation, and reproduction isolation
Natural selection: the process in which some members of a species have variations, and they survive and reproduce to pass on those beneficial traits
Artificial selection: artificial breeding to create organisms with desired traits
Cladogram: a tree diagram showing relationships between organisms
Reflection
This project was very helpful in my understanding of evolution. One peak of this project was my group's focus level. We were always focused and that really helped us make a good cladogram with an understandable evolutionary story. The most important thing to be in a group is focused. We all intertwined our evolutionary story ideas together so they all connected. Another peak was our final product. In the end, the cladogram was very well interpreted and easy to look at. Also, our presentation explaining the evolutionary stories was great. They were easily readable and well put together. A pit of this project was how long our presentation was. Our google slides was around 40 slides because we had to explain each genus and the species inside of it which took awhile. It looked like it got boring to listen to. We could have changed this by simplifying our slides to have just the needed material. Another pit was the time management. We finished our project three days before it was due so we had a couple days to just perfect what was already done. We should've spaced out our time so we had maximum time to work on our project efficiently and having three days just to perfect it led to more off task work than actual work. This could have been chanegd with better time management, but it isn't something that is necessarily a bad thing. This project taught me a lot about the way organisms have changed to diversify themselves from earlier organisms.