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Mrs. Rinhart 10th grade Biology: STEM

In Mrs. Rinhart’s biology class she is doing a STEM unit over aquaponics. In her class to

teach this lesson she is using science, technology, engineering and math all the parts of STEM in

one lesson. Her class has seen the setup process, the managing process and will soon see the

aftermath after winter break. Her class before setting up the system had to do research and on

how they system works, what it is and what type of plants and fish they want in the system.

Throughout the project, the students learned the science part of STEM by learning

about how they have created an ecosystem in their classroom. They learned about how the

system stays alive through a cycle and certain parts rely on others. The plants stay alive and

healthy because of the feces in the water that fertilizes the plants and the water gets filtered

and clean for the fish by the bio balls. All the parts rely on each other and the students are able

to witness this first hand. Technology is brought into the lesson when the students do research

on their chromebooks and when they record their observations in a google doc. They are able

to learn about engineering when they learned about the assembly of the aquaponics tank and

how the system is set up and how the filters and put in and the assembly of that. Math is

incorporated into her lesson by the data and graphs made by the students. The students keep

record of the date and hight of plants along with the ph level and the size of fish. All of this

information is able to be put into a graph later for the students to analyze.

Over all I think that the aquaponics lesson is a very fun and interesting lesson for the

students that gets them all involved and thinking in serval different ways over lots of math and

science aspects. It is also so important to teach that STEM is for all genders since there is un
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unspoken precedent that women can’t do jobs in STEM and the rates of females in career fields

like this are so low. In my future classroom I will make sure to show that STEM is fun and for

everyone.