Rachel Woodroof

    This year in science class, one of the things we learned about was the Earth’s Plate Tectonics. This is my first year at the Dayton Regional Stem school, before now I had never had a science class. In the beginning of school, we started learning the basics of Plate Tectonics, learning what it was. I think that this knowledge of plate tectonics is very important to know for when I get to high school. Knowing this now will help me in future classes that will be more complicated, and that I can use this as a backbone for new content. Throughout everything I feel I have grown the most in my understanding of what Plate Tectonics is, what they do and how it affects our Earth.

 

In the first few weeks of school we started off learning about the basics of Plate Tectonics and volcanic features on Earth. These were the weeks leading up to our Plate Tectonics project. The goal for this project was to fully understand Plate Tectonics, and make models that could potentially teach other students what it is as well. At the beginning of the project, we were assigned partners and a geographic location with Plate Tectonic interactions. Before we started constructing the physical model we had to learn the content we were making it a model of. We learned about all different types of and places the Plate Tectonics interact and the Earth’s crust, which is the structure of Plate Tectonics. We found out about all the layers of the Earth, and how they move, and have different thicknesses and densities. Also, that there is a crust and mantle, and that the crust is solid, and the mantle is liquid so it flows, and is moving around. This is what causes Plate Tectonics, the constantly moving core.

 

When it came down to the actual construction of the model we had to first build a prototype. For the prototype, it was a much smaller scale, and we didn’t make it polished with duct tape. We did this so we would basically have instructions to follow for the final model. We used it as the blue print to work out all the mechanical errors, and scientific facts that didn’t work right or we may have forgot. It also helped us figure out and add the necessities for keeping it together and durable.  My group and I re-built our prototype model over three times until we finally found a way that worked great. It was aggravating at first but then it became the best thing we could have done because later when we were building the final all we had to do was copy our prototype on a larger scale. 

 

Even though the prototype did help a lot, when it came down to the final we still had to improvise if something went wrong, and test it to revise a few minor yet major issues, like our convection arrows to show which way the current is moving. The prototype worked well as a guide but some things work better in a smaller scale, so we had to revise a few things to make them work in a larger scale. For example, the “stubs” we made to pop out of our models crust to represent the volcanic hotspot. They didn’t work out the way we wanted them to the first time so we had to improvise them so they would fit and work properly with the crust. The final model we made very polished and covered it head to toe in color coded duct tape then another layer of packing tape to keep the duct tape together or from getting damaged. The colors we used in our color key were; brown to represent the crust, red to represent the mantel, green to represent land and orange to represent our hotspot. Each model was about the size of a shoebox.

 

Throughout this entire process, I learned future concepts that could possibly help me with future jobs, and I fully understand what plate tectonics is, why it happens and where. this is what I think I have grown the most grown in this year in science class.