Sunday, October 21, 2012

Abstracting

Abstractions are simply different ways an object or idea can be represented.  These representations can include visual images, patterns, poems, textures, smells, songs, and many others.  "Abstractions are so common in our society that we rarely pat attention to them" (Root-Bernstein, pg. 70).  I feel as we age, we gain more and more experiences that crowd and cloud our mind and limit our ability to abstract do to the limited brain capacity we have to only see what is "needed".

Abstractions and analogies are essential to understanding science.  They happen practically daily.  The idea of taking something that is unfamiliar to you and relating it to something very familiar is an extremely strong learning concept in any subject, but especially science.   Abstractions are what cause advancements in our society.  It takes someone looking at a problem from outside the box in a new direction to come up with a new or different solution.  Those that do this are very good at abstracting.  As Mitchell Wilson stated in Sparks and Genius by Root-Bernsein, "I'll tell you what you need to be a great scientist   You don't have to be able to understand complicated things.  It's just the opposite.  You have to be able to see what looks like the most complicated thing in the world and, in a flash, find the underlying simplicity.  That's that you need: a talent for simplicity." (Root-Bernstein, pg. 78).  How true that is.

My goal is simplicity.  If I can take a concept that is "hard" and pair it together (analogy) with something the student is interested in and knowledgeable about, I have just made things simpler for that student.

The large umbrella concept I am investigating during this process is energy transfer.  The concept I am focusing on in this part of the project is the idea of over consumption of food and energy transferring to fat in our bodies.  I am likening this to a car and its need for gas to make it move and what would happen to the car if it followed the same consumption habits and energy outputs as a typical american does.  Below are my two different medium representations of this concept.

Medium One: Poetry
Eat Like a Car Does...When It's Empty!

Energy transfer is very simple you see
Almost everything does it, even you and me!
When we eat food we’re transferring energy,
Our body uses it to walk, talk, and even see.

Similar to how a car needs gas to go
Our bodies need food don’tcha know
When a car’s low on gas, a fill up is in need
If you don’t, someone else takes the lead  
When you don’t eat you could crash
Your temper might flare and people see your wrath

So we need a constant supply of food to go
But what happens when we eat too much bro?
When you fill-up a car, only so much can go in
We could gather any overflow and put it in a bin
Then we’d have some extra if we ever ran low
Which is a good thing wouldn't ya know!

What if we did that every time we filled the truck,
We’d have spare gas all over, that would suck.

When we feed our body too much energy to transfer
Storage of that energy is what does occur
This energy is stored as fat and that’s bad
It causes heart attacks, diabetes and other things that ain’t rad

So make sure you fill up when your body tells you to
But not too much cause then the energy you don’t use
Gets transferred to your sides, gut, chin, or hips
And if you’re not careful, even your lips!


Medium Two: Image
The images above came from the following sites:

These are my two ways at representing this concept in different ways than I have seen as well and analogizing it to the consumption of gas by a car.

To go further,  I plan to have students develop their own analogies for other energy transfer concepts (and other concepts in general) and then create some representation of their analogy.

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