Animal structure and function offers a great opportunity to use analogy to challenge your students to explore further.  In this activity students come up with analogies in an engineering context, showing what they have learned about various animal structures in the process.

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Engaging Activity:

Show your class the following TED Talk by Robert Full on curiosity, creativity, and how engineering animal structures can change our lives:

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Inquiry Activity:

Students spend a lot of time learning about various animal structures without understanding how this may be important.  Take your students understanding further and have them research or create their own inventions based on animal structures that they have studied.  Some examples can be found here:

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Brilliant Bio-Design:14 Animal Inspired Inventions

 

Connections to Biology:

A lot of inventions we have are analogous to animal structures because we have identified an advantage that an animal structure may have and designed a technology to mimic this.  This activity challenges students to apply what they have learned and also challenges them to consider why this may be important.  Evolution has selected for adaptations that are advantageous in certain environments and as technologies develop engineers are better able to borrow and adapt these evolutionary advantages for our own benefit.

 

 

 

 

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Engaging Activity:

​​You will need a block of cheese and a microwave.  Cut the block of cheese into three different sized cubes (one centimeter cubed, two centimeter cubed, and three centimeter cubed).  Ask your students which one they think will melt faster.  Place the three cubes in the microwave and watch.

 

 

Inquiry Activity:

Students should investigate the differences between the different sized cubes.  Have students compare the surface area and volume of the cubes of cheese.  Encourage students to pick their own sized blocks of cheese and record the time they take to melt.  Have students graph the volume to surface area ratio versus melting time.  What do you see?

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If something has a high volume and low surface area is it easy to get rid of things?

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Do our cells have to get rid of things?  Why do you think they are so small?  What would happen if they were bigger?

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​Connections to Biology:

​Biological size basically comes down to efficiency.  The cheese blocks have a hard time getting rid of heat when there is a large volume to surface area ratio.  Our cells are the same as cheese blocks, if they become to large it becomes difficult to exchange different molecules across the membrane.

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Lesson adapted from: John McDonald (University of Regina)

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If giant is inefficient why are some mammals so large. Here is a cool video that touches on how blue whales can be so big:

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