Patterns

In this modeling exercise, students work to depict the bacterial evolution, which underlies antibiotic resistance, to learn about the cross-cutting concept “Patterns”.

This modeling exercise leverages the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance to encourage students to think about natural selection/ evolution and the impacts of this in modern society. This can be started a number of ways based on teacher/student interest including showing a short clip of someone suffering from MRSA, a news report on the dangers of MRSA, or some way to peak initial student attention. Once this has been discussed, follow up with data sets on antibiotic resistance (here is an example) to show how widespread this phenomenon is. At this point a teacher can go right to asking students to model how antibiotic resistance is occuring or provide an additional support where students can hypothesize how quickly antibiotic resistance can develop before seeing it occur (in a video like this). Regardless of this choice, student modeling should focus on drawing how students think antibiotic resistance is occuring at the bacterial level over generations. Then the teacher would follow up with activities to provide insights into the actual process of antibiotic resistance with opportunities for students to revise their initial models. This modeling exercise includes students establishing both data driven patterns as well as those arising from their modeling.

Suggested Modeling Elements: Cells: Bacterial, Biomolecules: DNA and RNA

Suggested Sensemaking Components: Movement/Motion, Zoom in/out, Flow of Matter