Insect Invasion
Insect Invasion can be introduced with a true story from American history or through science fiction. The story about a huge swarm of locusts can be found here. Ideas for reading the story with students can be found here.
The science fiction movie clip option can be found here.
Can you imagine being attacked by a huge ant or having a huge swarm of locusts eat everything in its path?
The ants in the movie THEM! were carefully modeled after real ants.
The movie makers did a good job making these insect ant monsters. All the body parts looked like a real insect--only much larger:
All insects have three body parts:
The Head (where many of the senses are located, eyes, antennae, and mouthparts)
The Thorax (where most of the muscles for movement are located and legs and wings are attached)
The Abdomen (where digestion, egg production, and defensive stinging parts are found)
Many insects would be pretty scary if they were the size of trucks. Most are small and the largest are about the size of an adult's hand.
Insect Jaws and mouth parts would really be scary if they were monster size!
Some ants use their jaws to carry food, defend the colony, or chop up leaves.
The jaws of a ground beetle grab prey and cut them in pieces.
The pointed mouth of a true bug stabs plants (some stab other insects or humans) and then they pump the juices into their bodies!
Exploration: Making a static insect model. Practice the vocabulary of insect parts by assembling a model insect.
1. Give students starch peanuts and show how then can stick together by dampening one end and sticking it to another peanut. Starch peanuts are used in packing and are made from sorghum or corn. They are non toxic and the food value of the grain is removed, so it is a perfect biodegradable product.
2. Although these starch peanuts are non-toxic, dampening them should be done with a wet sponge. An adult might make a decision to use their tongue, but students should be instructed to use the sponge technique.
3. Allow students to select any insect of choice from a common reference sheet, such as:
4. Build a model bug using as much of the vocabulary as possible to reinforce a common language about insects. Head, thorax, abdomen, antennae, legs, wings, mouthparts, tarsi. Does your insect chew or stab its prey?
5. Students can color, decorate their insect as a warning color (red or yellow/black stripes), camouflage (green or brown patterns), night insects (black), or attracting insects (colorful patterns to attract a mate). Antennae can be added by using pipe cleaners. Eyes can be drawn using a sharp pointed felt-tipped pen by making tiny dots in a small circle. Most insects have compound eyes made of many tiny eye cells all collected together.
Compound eyes of a fruit fly.
6. Have students describe their starch insects by labelling the parts.
Exploration: Making a solid model.
Here is a quick video overview:
Here is a step-by-step process:
1. Find materials that can be easily connected with a glue gun. Corks, wooden balls, chunks of foam, plastic pieces, stiff wire, pipe cleaners--an assortment of things students could use to model an insect.
2. Find a piece of dense foam for the thorax. Push wires through to make legs as shown
3. Using stiff wires (they can be copper, iron, or aluminum--but not pipe cleaners) bend three into "U'" shapes and stick them through the holes. Glue underside of wires to hold them in place:
4. Add a head and abdomen by gluing to thorax.
5. Add antennae by gluing pipe cleaners onto head. (Pipe cleaners are a good analogy because they are textured--insect antennae are sensory) .
6. Add a compound eye by dotting the head with a marker.
7. The insect is now ready for action! An AA cell, a switch and a vibrator motor out of a cell phone can be connected as follows:
The motor has an unbalanced weight on the shaft that wobbles when it runs. These kinds of motors, many kinds of switches and AA cells and holders are readily available through electronic warehouses such as www.goldmine-elec-products.com/ and ebay.
Slide switches are easy to use and cheap (usually less than 20 cents each
Miniature vibrator motors often come with two wires already attached. About $1 each. You can substitute a regular tiny hobby motor and add a weight to the shaft to achieve the same effect.
Cell holders are a little less common, but can be found on eBay for about $1 each. You can also solder wires directly to the cell and avoid this cost, or use a sturdy rubber band to hold the wires onto each end of the cell.
7. Glue the motor to the abdomen of the bot.
8. Add the battery and switch
9. Depending on how you position the motor and bend the legs, your bot will either travel in circles, go backwards, or go forwards. It can travel rather quickly if the motor actually touches the surface lightly.
STEM CHALLENGE
I. Your insect bot is larger that the actual bug. How much larger? What scale is it (like train gauges that are ratios of the actual size of a train). Is your insect 2X, 5X, 10X as large as the real insect? How can you tell? Once you have a scale, then compute the speed of your bot. How fast is your insect? How does that compare to the speed of the real insect? How about the ant in the movie? Did is move too slow or too fast for its size? How can you tell?
II. Battle bots are designed to do damage to each other. Engineering students use these kind of challenges to design impressive machines that can avoid injury and impart mayhem! The insect bots that we have made here can be modified so that when a bot is hit by another bot, a switch can be activated turning the bot off. How can the bot be modified to add a "kill" switch so that the skittering bots can stop one another?
III. How could you design an animatronics model similar to those found at Disney World?
Why is this STEM?
Our story starts with the science fiction premise about giant insects caused from nuclear radiation. The people that wrote this story and produced the film had to know a great deal about insects and how they are designed as well as their biology to make the story believable. How they assemble a model must take in consideration all of the functioning parts of the insects. It is interesting that in this story the scientist is an entomologist--someone very informed on the biology of insects.
Technology becomes an important aspect of telling this story. How will they assemble a large model that does not weigh so much that it cannot stand on its legs? How will they animate the antenna, mouth parts and legs? Learning how things can be assembled and animated is a feature of technology--learning how motors, switches, and batteries operate within a system.
Making decisions about how to solve specific problems like how to make the ant break its antennae or move its giant jaws is a real engineering feat! How can we solve simple problems using the materials we have, the time restraints we are under, and with a solution that will work reliably--these are the sideboards that engineers work with on any project.
In this example, and at this level, we apply mathematics to determining the scale of our insect. If the speed of our insect correct compared to its size? We must use ratios to compare relative size. We must use a ratio of distance/time to understand speed.
When we use all the disciplines, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to help solve a problem, we are engaged in true STEM curriculum.
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