APES Sustainability Lab

Right after Thanksgiving Break, we're doing the Sustainability AP Lab AKA Tragedy of the Commons. 

Last year, we used Kristi Schertz's Happy Fishing Lab that you can find here. The only modification that I made was that our fishing poles were straws with paper clips to catch Fruit Loops instead of mini marshmallows. Well, that and we used way too many fish. I'll be using AP's suggested number of fish this time!

This year, we'll still start with the data tables from the Happy Fishing Lab, but it will be Part 1 of the AP Sustainability Lab. Then we'll move onto the actual AP lab for Part 2. I put together this Google Sheet to help students keep track of their data for part 2. I like to keep all of the class data together so students can see what other groups are doing. I also just add another tab each year by making a copy of the master tab. I have some Sheets from labs in AP Bio that have nearly 10 years of data!

The sheet is set up for four groups of four, but the groupings could always be copied and pasted for more groups, or even multiple tabs made. 

AP Environmental Science Cemetery Demographics

There is a wonderful, large, old cemetery less than a five minute drive from my school. This year I decided that we'd take a trip to the Albany Rural Cemetery to gather data for APES Lab #5. Because the cemetery is so close, I think we can gather lots of data during one of our 80 minute classes.

I want students to be able to focus on the graphs made and what they mean in terms of demographic transition and mortality rates. I started with Kristi Schertz's spreadsheet, and then converted it to work with College Board's math to go with the Cemetery Lab. This way, students just need to enter their raw data and the sheet will do the calculations for them. Then they can focus on what all of the numbers mean, and I don't need to give quite as much class time to calculations since we're taking an entire block class to collect the data.

We haven't used the sheet yet, so there may need to be some corrections made to formulas, but I wanted to share what I have just in case it would be helpful to another class that's about to do this lab. If you are wondering, the initials in cells B1 to L1 are my students' initials so they each know where to enter their data. If you'd like, you could add rows for each of your students, or assign lab groups to each column instead.

Here's the spreadsheet.

I also made a data collection sheet for students to bring to the cemetery. My thought was that each student would collect 25 dates from pre-1900 and 25 from post-1900, which gives us a total of 550 pieces of data. I made a dashed line in the middle-ish of the paper so they could aim to get about half female and half male data as well. 

Fillable Lab Sheets for AP Environmental Science Labs

Another one of my new classes for this year is AP Environmental Science.  Since we are a one to one device school, my goal is for students to complete as many lab analyses by Google Docs as possible. This saves lots of photocopies. A surprising bonus is that I am finding the labs faster to grade this way. Labs that are turned in through Google Classroom as google docs can be commented on. I can quickly type in a few comments to students' lab and count comments to determine the grade. 

One other I like about making fillable labs in Google docs is using 1-cell tables for the answers. Otherwise I find myself searching for answers that blend in with questions.

The labs themselves with teacher editions and student editions with procedures can be found in AP Classroom for Environmental Science if you are an approved teacher. 

I'll add links to the three labs that I've made fillable answer sheets for. If I could find a fillable lab sheet that someone else had done, I used them and didn't reinvent the wheel.

AP Lab #1: Primary Productivity

AP Lab #2: Species Diversity

AP Lab #7: Physical and Chemical Properties of Soil