High Altitude Living

Storyline Unit

High Altitude Living

Lesson Plan 1

How can some people live at higher altitudes while other people get ill visiting these places?

High school students, as scientists, investigate people’s experiences at high altitudes in order to answer the following driving question: How can some people live at higher altitudes while other people get ill visiting these places? Students figure out that high altitude locations have lower oxygen levels and the lower oxygen levels are what causes mountain sickness for visitors. Students will model their initial ideas about what they think is different physiologically between people who live in low oxygen environments and those that visit there.

Lesson Plan 2

How is the Tibetan population able to live in low oxygen environments?

High school students, as scientists, investigate populations’ physiological differences at high altitude in order to answer the lesson question: How is the Tibetan population able to live in low oxygen environments? Students obtain information from a diagram illustrating how oxygen is transported through the body and a series of articles. Using this information, students figure out that ethnically Tibetan populations have different physiological responses and adaptations to low oxygen environments than Han Chinese populations. Students will add new ideas to a model template that is similar to the previous lesson in order to explain how these adaptations help ethnically Tibetan people live in low oxygen environments.

Lesson Plan 3

Where did the Tibetan population's physiological strategies come from?

High school students, as scientists, investigate people’s experiences in low oxygen environments in order to answer the following lesson question: Where did the Tibetan population’s physiological strategies come from? Students figure out that some of the physiological strategies are influenced by genetics as well as the environment. Students will use the class genetic model that explains oxygen saturation levels to apply their understanding to another adaptive trait.

Lesson Plan 4

Does everyone living in this region have these alleles?

Students wonder why the trait for high arterial oxygen saturation has different frequencies in different areas of the world. They decide to create a model to help them explain this difference. They notice this trait has a lot more variation than they thought and decide to first model a simpler example. They learn about variation in populations of rock pocket mice and create a model that explains how the distribution of the trait changes over time and reflect on the model to identify the components of natural selection. Students use this model to return to the initial phenomenon to explain how that changes over time.

Lesson Plan 5

Where did these different alleles come from?

Students investigate an example of new traits arising in populations by watching a video that shows the growth of bacteria on increasingly high concentrations of antibiotics as the bacterial genome accumulates mutations that confer antibiotic resistance. Students wonder how these mutations can develop so quickly. Students create a mathematical representation of bacterial reproduction to model the speed at which these populations grow to figure out that while mutation rates make it seem like mutations are very rare, they are instead quite common due to the rate at which bacterial populations reproduce. They extend this to the rock pocket mouse model and see that in a case where organisms do not reproduce as quickly, the sheer size of an organism’s genome and the number of offspring produced in a generation still guarantees mutations will accumulate over time. Finally, students return to their consensus models and use them to make predictions about what would happen in the case of specific mutations in different environments. Then they test their predictions using a computer simulation and consider the affordances of one type of model over another.

Lesson Plan 6

Do all of the high altitude populations have the same mutation?

High school students as scientists predict if different human populations that live in low oxygen environments have similar or different adaptive traits to help them survive in these environments. Then students investigate their alleles and physical traits in order to answer the following lesson question: If one allele is better, why is the other one still around? Students figure out that natural selection is complex and typically acts on the cumulation of an individual’s total trait for surviving in specific environments such as low oxygen environments.

Lesson Plan 7

Do all kinds of organisms have a lot of genetic diversity?

High school students as scientists investigate genetics, natural selection, and evolution to answer the following driving question: Do all kinds of organisms have a lot of genetic diversity? Students analyze a dataset to see that genetic diversity varies in different populations, but all populations do have some degree of genetic diversity. After analyzing genetic diversity across different species worldwide, students wonder why some populations have higher levels of genetic diversity than others and if this difference is significant. Next, students analyze a dataset to look for patterns in genetic diversity between different populations of different species. They find no clear pattern between any specific type of organisms and amount of genetic diversity. Students read about organisms with varying degrees of genetic diversity and find patterns in causes that led to low diversity. They return to the dataset and choose some of the organisms with low diversity to find they too suffered similar environmental issues. Students consider how genetic diversity in human populations is similar or different from the populations they’ve looked at. Finally, students return to their initial Driving Question Board to determine which of the questions they had can now be answered. They then use what they have learned throughout this unit to explain how genetic diversity is maintained in populations and why genetic diversity is important, and they think about how they want to use this information to learn more and to help educate others.

Lesson Plan 8

How does the knowledge of evolution and population genetics help us understand future effects of environmental changes?

High school students, as scientists, investigate places that have or are experiencing environmental changes to see how organisms are being affected by these changes. Students research which physiological strategies and traits are helping an organism survive and reproduce in the changed environment. Students evaluate if these physiological strategies or traits have genetic mechanisms involved, and model how evolution by natural selection might change the population over time. Students then create a DIY Exhibit that will be shared with their community. Students use information from their models, articles, and other work from previous lessons to develop possible explanations and use it to talk about the role humans can play in protecting different nonhuman populations. Students receive peer feedback and revise their exhibits for public exhibition.