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Get a Life!
How can you tell if an object is living? If it is alive,
what conditions are essential for its survival? In “Get a Life!”,
you’ll have an opportunity to test your ideas by creating tiny
habitats to which you introduce objects that puzzle or interest you.
Your habitats are strung together in a necklace so that you’ll
be right there to observe what happens!
Materials Required
Instructions
- Collect objects that
you wish to test for life. Things that you suspect to be plants,
seeds, animals, or eggs make good choices.
Your objects
must be small enough to introduce into a microcentrifuge
tube.
- For each object, determine the conditions that will help
you test for life.
- Create these conditions in the appropriate tubes.
- Introduce
the objects you’ve chosen into their tubes.
- Wear your Get A Life
Necklace!
- Monitor the tubes regularly for signs of life.
- Be sure
to sustain the conditions you created in each tube.
Activity Questions
Before you begin
- What are the five characteristics of life?
- Which characteristics
do you think you can test for in a microcentrifuge tube?
- How can you
test for these characterisitcs?
- How will you know if you’re
observing these characteristics?
- In creating conditions in your tubes, does
it matter whether the object is a
plant or animal? Why or why
not?
After the activity
- What objects did you place in your
tubes?
- Which objects did you conclude
to be living?
- For each item, what
evidence convinced you of this?
- Were there any items for which
the evidence was inconclusive?
- How would you modify conditions to try to obtain more
conclusive results?
SHARE YOUR RESULTS: Get a Life!
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