Project Reflection Page
Shark Dissection
At first, personally, I was freaked out by all the dead animals in Colleens fridge, but after the first day, it was normal. We did the dissections for three weeks with TCAP Testing right in the middle of the dissections. The smell was in the hallway for a while, and took a lot of cleaning. Each day we would go over a different system of the body, clean up and then fill out the section of the packet that was needed. The final exam was slightly stressful, because there were only two exams going on at once and the video would catch everything. But I studied and I got 68/68 on my dissection.
Monkey Meal Plan
For the Monkey meal plan, everybody was creating their own recipes that could be served to monkeys, with some of them having allergies against certain food. Another challenging aspect of the project was that the monkeys couldn't get more than a certain amount of calories, and neither could the chimpanzees. You could chose to do a recipe for just monkeys, just chimps or for both. But there were all restrictions for each recipes, and no more than a certain amount of fats, calories, carbs, etc.
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Durango Nature Studies Habitat Assessment Project
For this project, we went to the Durango nature Studies to do some frog catching, and assessing the habitat. We were looking for two types of frogs; Bullfrogs and Leopard frogs. Before we went to DNS, our teacher taught us about each specimen, such as the Bullfrog was an invasive species that was brought to Colorado in the 1930's for hunting and they will eat anything that fits in their mouth. But then Leopard frogs, on the other hand, were become very rare because the Bullfrog (who was much larger) was competing for the same resources and was winning. The fieldwork that we did took only about an hour, the first half an hour was to try and capture the frogs but then the second half we each had our own jobs. To capture frogs, we had to be quiet (which was difficult for Sophomores in high school), circle the pond and walk forward to scare the frogs. We counted all the frogs, and Colleen decided that it was time that we used Excel and make the worksheets. That wasn't really that hard for me, but apparently some kids had issues. The only difficult thing for me was the technical writing which means no personality, only scientific facts. I am a very artistic person, so not having any detail or 'fluffy' stuff as I call it, in my paper... Sucked. If I could change one thing that I did on the paper, it would be to actually take some time and go through it and make it look really presentable. All in all, the Durango Nature Studies Habitat Assessment was a success.