Parent Resources
Looks like your child is ready to change the world! If your child has entered the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge, you may be looking for ways you can be supportive. The resources on this site offer great information and ideas. Below are some specific ways you can help your child change the world!
- Check out the resources on this site: The site is filled with great information about the environmental issues we face and ways to create sustainable changes. You can also measure your own Ecological Footprint and watch videos that will help your child through the Challenge process.
- Go through the Challenge Steps with your child so you know what the Challenge is all about.
- Review the deadlines and project requirements to help the team stay on track.
- Help to broaden your child’s view of the community by encouraging him or her to visit different areas where environmental issues may exist, talking with community experts and taking advantage of all of the resources that your community offers.
- Encourage the team to choose a topic that really matters to them and that they can really change. They become winners by having a positive impact on something.
- Be a green role model by reducing your own Ecological Footprint and creating an environmentally-friendly lifestyle for your family.
- Offer your support, encouragement and guidance but let the final project belong to your child’s team!
* National Science Education Standards practiced in the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge
Students who take on the Challenge will:
- Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigation
- Design and conduct a scientific investigation
- Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data
- Develop descriptions, explanation, predictions, and models using evidence
- Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations
- Communicate scientific procedures and explanations
- Identify appropriate problems
- Design a solution
- Implement the proposed design
- Evaluate the completed design
- Recognize how science can influence society and how people think about the environment
Depending on the problem identified, students will also improve their science conceptual understanding that:
- When an area becomes overpopulated, the environment will become degraded due to the increased use of resources.
- Causes of environmental degradation and resource depletion vary from region to region and from country to country.
- A population consists of all individuals of a species that occur together at a given place and time. All populations living together and the physical factors with which they interact compose an ecosystem.
- Populations of organisms can be categorized by the function they serve in an ecosystem. Plants and some micro-organisms are producers--they make their own food. All animals, including humans, are consumers, which obtain food by eating other organisms. Decomposers, primarily bacteria and fungi, are consumers that use waste materials and dead organisms for food. Food webs identify the relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in an ecosystem.
- For ecosystems, the major source of energy is sunlight. Energy entering ecosystems as sunlight is transferred by producers into chemical energy through photosynthesis. That energy then passes from organism to organism in food webs.
- The number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on the resources available and abiotic factors, such as quantity of light and water, range of temperatures, and soil composition. Given adequate biotic and abiotic resources and no disease or predators, populations (including humans) increase at rapid rates. Lack of resources and other factors, such as predation and climate, limit the growth of populations in specific niches in the ecosystem.
- Extinction of a species occurs when the environment changes and the adaptive characteristics of a species are insufficient to allow its survival. Fossils indicate that many organisms that lived long ago are extinct. Extinction of species is common; most of the species that have lived on the earth no longer exist.
Source: National Science Education Standards, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1996
