eTwinning project scheme

General details  

Name of project: Scientific aquariophilia
For:

• 4 ESO (age 15-16)
• Groups of 15-30 students
• Work teams of 4-6 students from 2 or 3of the partner schools participants
• No limit of total partners participants (the more, the best). 

Curricula subjects:

Biology: ecosystems, biotic and abiotic components and factors, energy and biomass flow.
Mathematics: statistics

Objectives

• Learn about ecosystem ecology through an aquiarium maintenance
• Use the scientific method and propose hypothesis  
• Let students get control of their own learning process.
• Get involved and cowork in citizen science projects.

Process 

Students will maintain an aquiarium and recolect data from survival, grouth and various factors mesures (hours of light, temperature, pH of water, food given, ...) to study their ecology.
Teachers will decide the species to use, in order to use common species and have data from each partner concerning the same species. Any aquarium and any number of species used could be usefull, from the simplest (copepoda in a bottle) to the more complex and biggest aquarium with fish, invertebrates and algae species.
All data will be upload to a common data base.
Students will use the data base to work with figures, search correlations and make hypothesis.

ICT tools used: Google Forms, Google Spreadsheet and Google Docs.
communication tools among partners used: TwinSpace

Final product:
papers about ecology of the aquarium species used and the influence of some biotic or abiotic factors.
more final products: ?

Evaluation 

• Students shoud provide data of their observation and mesures to a common data base
• Student collaborative work teams shoud write a paper explaining their works, results, data from common data base used and hypothesis issued.