Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
Crosscutting Concepts
Cause and Effect
Knowledge
Students know:
- Human activities have significantly altered the environment, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species.
- Changes to Earth's environments can have different positive and negative impacts for different living things.
- Typically as human populations and per-capita consumption of natural resources increase, so do the negative impacts on Earth unless the activities and technologies involved are engineered otherwise.
- Technology is anything man-made that solves a problem or fulfills a desire.
- Technology can be an object, system, or process.
- Engineering is a systematic and often iterative approach to designing objects, processes, and systems to meet human needs and wants.
- The Engineering Design Process (EDP) is a series of steps engineers use to guide them as they solve problems.
- The EDP may include the following cyclical steps: ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve.
- Scientific information and principles regarding human impact on the environment must be used to design a process or solution that addresses the results of a particular human activity.
- Scientific information and principles regarding human impact on the environment must be used to design a process or solution that incorporates technologies that can be used to monitor negative effects that human activities have on the environment.
- Scientific information and principles regarding human impact on the environment must be used to design a process or solution that incorporates technologies that can be used to minimize negative effects that human activities have on the environment.
- Causal and correlational relationships between the human activity and the negative environmental impact must be distinguished to facilitate the design of the process or solution.
- Criteria and constraints for the solution must be defined and quantified to include individual or societal needs or desires and constraints imposed by economic conditions (e.g., costs of building and maintaining the solution).
- Criteria are the principles or standards by which the process or solution is judged.
- Constraints are the limitations or restrictions on the process or solution.
- The process or solution must meet the criteria and constraints.
- Limitations of the use of technologies exist.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Use scientific information and principles to generate a design solution for a problem related to human impact on the environment.
- Identify relationships between the human activity and the negative environmental impact based on scientific principles.
- Distinguish between causal and correlational relationships to facilitate the design of the solution.
- Define and quantify, when appropriate, criteria and constraints for the solution.
- Describe how well the solution meets the criteria and constraints, including monitoring or minimizing a human impact based on the causal relationships between relevant scientific principles about the processes that occur in, as well as among, Earth systems and the human impact on the environment.
- Identify limitations of the use of technologies employed by the solution.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- A process or solution must meet criteria and constraints, including monitoring or minimizing a human impact based on the causal relationships between relevant scientific principles about the processes that occur in, as well as among, Earth systems and the human impact on the environment.
Vocabulary
- Habitat
- Extinction
- Species
- Human Impact
- Population
- Per-capita consumption
- Technology
- Object
- System
- Process
- Engineer
- Engineering Design Process (EDP)
- Monitor
- Minimize
- Solution
- Causal and correlational relationships
- Criteria
- Constraints
- Limitations
