How many female scientists do you know? The Scientific Method

 

Por Raquel Fiz:

1- The unit chosen is UD 1. "Scientific Method"

2- Contents are divided in 4 main sections: 2.1. Science vs. pseudosience (History of Science, science specializations, Introduction to scientific method) 2.2. How scientists do research (experiments vs. observational studies) 2.3. Research in the lab. Types of labs. Lab safety rules and Lab materials. 2.4. Experimenting and measurements. International System of Units, work in the lab. 3. Driving Question:

The driving question for this unit-project would be:

How many female scientists do you know? OR

"Why don't we know so many female scientists"?

The final product would be a small representation/theater in teams about the life of one chosen scientist. 4. Cooperative structures I would use are:

Groups of 4 people will be formed. We will start with a brainstorming in groups of their idea of "The life of a scientist". In this small task students need to draw how they imagine the life of a scientist is. Each group needs to collect questions they might ask to a scientists. Then they will fill the tempalate "what they know - what they wonder".

* http://steamit.eun.org/category/stem-careers/ On this page, you will find information and multimedia resources (career sheets, videos, podcasts) about exciting STEM-related careers.": 

Then 4 different scientists from different fields (2 female, 2 male) will share a short video explaining about a "day of their life". The objective is that the students understand scientists are humans and have families and a "normal life", so that they update their image of the "lonely crazy scientist in his lab", and also they visualize the female figure, the research teams... The second purpose is that students understand every field requires of different lab/equipment depending on research. The scientific method and the equipment of their labs will also be discussed. The students will sum the information with "Visual thinking", structuring the information in a single page with images.

The International system of units will be explained and a role-play game in groups will be carried out to represent the "Mars Orbiter" case, where the teams (groups) calculate in different units, leading to the failure. Next task will be that students need to apply the scientific method to the driving question: Why do we know fewer female scientists than men? the procedure here is that they need to use TICs/ Internet to find and select female scientists and brainstorm about how they want to represent their life. 5. Final product:

it will be the small representation, and the audience will be the rest of the school as a kinda "theather" representation.

If possible on february 11th (International Day of Women in Science".