Misar- Ideas for Scratch- Application of my middle school science teaching experience

When it comes to designing modeling tasks for middle school science students- I have the benefit of having taught middle school science in Nashville at a local private school for two years. I thought for a few minutes about concepts where they needed additional support. The following is a list of the top three most difficult topics for my middle school students (based on the Catholic Diocese of Nashville's curriculum).

6th Grade
- plate tectonic boundaries (convergent, divergent, & transform) and how they contribute to mountains, volcanoes, rifts, and ocean spreading
- weather fronts (warm, cold, occluded, & stationary)- the relationship between cold and hot air and how it moves in a direction, and what weather patterns each form
- life cycle of a star- a general idea about what happens between and during each stage

7th Grade
- food web in ecology- specifically human impact on the web as  whole not just the chain (what happens if we take up more land- diminishing how much grass and space the animals have? what happens if we over hunt one or two species?)
-classification/taxonomy of animals- they usually understand how to use one but need more experience creating one
- heredity- pundit square and how to fill in the gaps when tracing a trait through a genealogy (usually one of their investigation projects)

8th Grade
- balancing equations- they understood counting each individual element but they struggled with understanding its relationship with molecules
- waves- diffraction, refraction, reflection, absorption, scattering & transmission
-vectors/forces- how they combine and that their can be many impacting one item (as demonstrated at the beginning of the Wilensky Thinking in Levels article)

As a teacher, I would try to do as many hands on investigations as possible to explore these topics. I also set up various stations around the room exploring a topic. These stations usually had a videos, hands on activity, drawing a concept, short answer/explanations, and vocabulary practice. My teaching (at the time) did not provide many opportunities for the students to create the information based on their exploration and discovery.

Looking at these topics now, I have a few ideas about how we could design a program to model or create a space for them to explore the topic further. The neat thing is that the majority of these can be examined systematically as mentioned in the Wilensky article. I particularly like the idea of creating a model and having the students modify it to deepen their understanding- which could be done more easily with the 7th and 8th grade topics. Such as with ecology (adding the how humans impact a food web- similar to Wilensky's predator prey model), giving the students control on creating a taxonomy to divide up the group of animals through creating a taxonomy, filling in the gaps in a genealogical tree to trace a trait, adding walls to a body of water to explore a waves, and applying/identifying force to/on various objects. With balancing equations students could explore how putting various coefficients will impact a visual and on their own they can create the next level- a more complicated equation with molecules. I am struggling with coming up with ideas for further exploring the 6th grade topics.