Over the past few days we traveled to Borderlands again to collect data for our mock Internal Assessment. Overall it was an enjoyable experience, particularly the hands-on element of the science.

I found the trip to be a great way to experience biological data collection out of the classroom as we spent most of the 2 available days in the forest. It gave me a new perspective on the subject as rather than discussing theoretical behavior or microscopic molecules, we were measuring and collecting data on the impacts of the science in question.

The trip also opened my mind to just how diverse the science is. For instance while carrying our our river study, we measured the width and speed of different parts of the river. One observation I had was that the fish only tended to occupy the wider parts of the river, which I attributed to the safety of having space to flee to should they be hunted. However, after discussion I realized that this was actually a result of the speed of the river, being much slower in the wider areas. I commented on how this is different to fish in aquariums that usually prefer fast running water as they don’t have to move to filter water through their gills, as their swimming efforts keep them stationary.

I also became familiar with more scientific methods of data collection, particularly the use of random quadrants to simulate the data of an area. Previously in the MYP if data collection was highly inconvenient we would adjust our method to adapt for this, which was not the case this year. Because it was time consuming to count all species in our 10m quadrant, we created random co-ordinates inside the quadrant and multiplied our results to cover the entire quadrant. This was a new area of methodology I was not used to and I found very interesting, particularly the “Random” aspect. As we could not consistently produce random numbers we had to use calculators to produce our co-ordinates for instance.