Overview
In this introductory activity, students will watch two videos of people living with diabetes and create initial explanatory models to access any prior knowledge they may have about the disease and anchor the lessons throughout the unit.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards
- Life Science
- [HS-LS2] Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
- NGSS Crosscutting Concept
- Patterns
- Causation
- Systems
- Stability and Change
- NGSS Practice
- Analyzing Data
- Asking Questions, Defining Problems
- Using Models
Computational Thinking in STEM
- Data Practices
- Analyzing Data
- Modeling and Simulation Practices
- Using Computational Models to Understand a Concept
- Systems Thinking Practices
- Investigating a Complex System as a Whole
- Understanding the Relationships within a System
Credits
Unit designed by Eleanor Kemp a teacher at Lindblom.
Acknowledgement
These lessons utilize resources from Project Neuron, a curriculum program developed by the University of Illinois, and HASPI (Health and Science Pipeline Initiatives).
Activities
- 1. Living with Diabetes
- 2. Modeling Diabetes
Student Directions and Resources
In the lesson that follows, you will watch two videos of diabetic patients and create an initial model of what you think may be happening inside their bodies.
1. Living with Diabetes
After watching each of the videos below, answer the questions that follow.
- What do you think is the major difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes?
- What evidence do you have that supports your answer to the previous question?
- What information do you currently have that helps you understand diabetes? Note: please provide any prior knowledge you have about the disease, including (but not limited to) vocabulary words and explanations. If you have no prior knowledge about diabetes, then at least provide some information you learned from watching the videos.
- What more information do you need in order to fully understand what is happening to the patients in both videos?
2. Modeling Diabetes
With your group members, you will create a drawing of the processes you think are occurring in a diabetic's body. Your drawing can be created on paper or in a digital drawing platform, but either one should be uploaded (pictures are fine) once you have completed them.
Your diagram/model should include the following components:
- Outline of a human body
- Organs/organ systems involved in diabetes
- Particular dysfunction within the system (body) - meaning you must somehow show WHAT is not being regulated properly in a diabetic's body.
- How dysfunction could lead to particular symptoms of a diabetic (think about what the patients in the video mentioned feeling or noticing about their bodies).
- Treatment of the dysfunction
- How a Type 1 and Type 2 diabetic will be DIFFERENT in terms of dysfunction and treatment (again, think about what was mentioned in videos).
At this point, you may not have all of information needed to make a complete model, but you should be able to at least provide some background knowledge/explanations for how diabetes is an example of an imbalance in our body systems and disruption of homeostasis.
