OpenSciEd Demo VideoOpenSciEd Scope & Sequence VideoCSDE Model Curricula Quick Start GuideEquitable and Inclusive Curriculum  The CSDE believes in providing a set of conditions where learners are repositioned at the center of curricula planning and design. Curricula, from a culturally responsive perspective, require intentional planning for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the development of units and implementation of lessons. It is critical to develop a learning environment that is relevant to and reflective of students’ social, cultural, and linguistic experiences to effectively connect their culturally and community-based knowledge to the class. Begin by connecting what is known about students’ cognitive and interdisciplinary diversity to the learning of the unit. Opposed to starting instructional planning with gaps in students’ knowledge, plan from an asset-based perspective by starting from students’ strengths. In doing so, curricula’s implementation will be grounded in instruction that engages, motivates, and supports the intellectual capacity of all students.Course Description: Using 3-Dimesional design pedagogy, Connecticut’s NGSS employ: Science/Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI’s) and Crosscutting Concepts that are used to make up Student Expectations:Each year, students in Connecticut should be able to demonstrate greater capacity for connecting knowledge across, and between, the physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering design. During Grade 7, students will begin to form deeper connections between concepts previously learned in grades K–6, such as collecting evidence and drawing conclusions, understanding relationships between objects, and critical thinking that leads to designing effective solutions for problems. Upon completion of Grade 7, students should have a deeper understanding of: • Physical, chemical and metabolic reactions; • Factors that affect the cycling of matter and photosynthesis; • Human impact on natural resources, and; • The dynamics of our ecosystem.Aligned Core Resources:Core resources is a local control decision.  Ensuring alignment of resources to the standards is critical for success. The CSDE has identified OpenSciEd as a highly aligned core resource after a rigorous review process. Additional Course Information: NGSS has unique features. To better understand the make-up of NGSS visit the following website for a more detailed break-down of the CT Science standards from which this curriculum was based. Nextgenscience Assessment Information:To support teachers with being able to use the OpenSciEd instructional materials, a set of professional learning resources has been developed that accompany each unit. All of the resources can be accessed by adding them to your Google Drive or by downloading into Microsoft Office documents from the Google Drive folder using the links below. To access the student and teacher versions of these units, visit the Instructional Materials Page.Additionally, the Connecticut State Department of Education has developed NGSS interim Assessment blocks specific to the grade 6-8 grade band. These can be accessed through the CSDE Website in the Performance Office tab.ELA/Math Transferable Skills Addressed in the Course: The following Practices Venn Diagram illustrates the connections and commonalities in the major content areas. This diagram attempts to cluster practices and capacities that have similar tenets and/or significant overlaps in the student expectations. Likewise, we have placed practices and capacities within the disciplinary domains if there was not a significant overlap or relationship to another discipline. One could argue certain practices/capacities could be placed in other positions within the Venn diagram. These placements are not definitive and the intention of the standards documents may not have conceptualized the three disciplinary areas In this manner. ​​ 

Seventh grade chemistry students' conceptual understanding of chemical reactions for middle school science is foundational to much science learning. Understanding atomic level reactions is crucial for learning physical, life, earth, and space science. Even more importantly, they open up new windows of curiosity for students to see the world around them. By seventh grade, students are ready to take on the abstract nature of the interactions of atoms and molecules far too small to see.To pique 7th grade students’ curiosity and anchor the learning for the unit in the visible and concrete, students start with an experience of observing and analyzing a bath bomb as it fizzes and eventually disappears in the water. Their observations and questions about what is going on drive learning that digs into a series of related phenomena as students iterate and improve their models depicting what happens during chemical reactions for middle school science. By the end of the unit, students have a firm grasp on how to model simple molecules, know what to look for to determine if chemical reactions have occurred, and apply their knowledge to chemical reactions to show how mass is conserved when atoms are rearranged.Embedded in this 7th grade chemistry unit are a variety of assessments, including self, peer, formative, and summative assessment tasks. This unit concludes with a transfer task in which students apply what they have figured out to two different related phenomena, elephant’s toothpaste and the crumbling of the marble that makes up the Taj Mahal.

In this 21-day unit, students are introduced to the anchoring phenomenon—a flameless heater in a Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) that provides hot food to people by just adding water. In the first lesson set, students explore the inside of an MRE flameless heater, then do investigations to collect evidence to support the idea that this heater and another type of flameless heater (a single-use hand warmer) are undergoing chemical reactions as they get warm. Students have an opportunity to reflect on the engineering design process, defining stakeholders, and refining the criteria and constraints for the design solution.In the second lesson set, students develop their design solutions by investigating how much food and reactants they should include in their homemade heater designs and go through a series of iterative testing and redesigning. This iterative design cycle includes peer feedback, consideration of design modification consequences, and analysis of impacts on stakeholders. Finally, students optimize their designs and have another team test their homemade heater instructions.

This unit on metabolic reactions in the human body starts out with students exploring a real case study of a middle-school girl named M’Kenna, who reported some alarming symptoms to her doctor. Her symptoms included an inability to concentrate, headaches, stomach issues when she eats, and a lack of energy for everyday activities and sports that she used to play regularly. She also reported noticeable weight loss over the past few months, in spite of consuming what appeared to be a healthy diet. Her case sparks questions and ideas for investigations around trying to figure out which pathways and processes in M’Kenna’s body might be functioning differently than a healthy system and why.Students investigate data specific to M’Kenna’s case in the form of doctor’s notes, endoscopy images and reports, growth charts, and micrographs. They also draw from their results from laboratory experiments on the chemical changes involving the processing of food and from digital interactives to explore how food is transported, transformed, stored, and used across different body systems in all people. Through this work of figuring out what is causing M’Kenna’s symptoms, the class discovers what happens to the food we eat after it enters our bodies and how M’Kenna’s different symptoms are connected.

Unit SummaryThis unit on the cycling of matter and photosynthesis begins with 7th grade students reflecting on what they ate for breakfast. Students are prompted to consider where their food comes from and consider which breakfast items might be from plants. Then students taste a common breakfast food, maple syrup, and see that according to the label, it is 100% from a tree.Based on the preceding unit, students argue that they know what happens to the sugar in syrup when they consume it. It is absorbed into the circulatory system and transported to cells in their body to be used for fuel. Students explore what else is in food and discover that food from plants, like bananas, peanut butter, beans, avocado, and almonds, not only have sugars but proteins and fats as well. This discovery leads them to wonder how plants are getting these food molecules and where a plant’s food comes from.Students figure out that they can trace all food back to plants, including processed and synthetic food. They obtain and communicate information to explain how matter gets from living things that have died back into the system through processes done by decomposers. Students finally explain that the pieces of their food are constantly recycled between living and nonliving parts of a system.

Unit SummaryThis unit on ecosystem dynamics and biodiversity begins with students reading headlines that claim that the future of orangutans is in peril and that the purchasing of chocolate may be the cause. Students then examine the ingredients in popular chocolate candies and learn that one of these ingredients--palm oil--is grown on farms near the rainforest where orangutans live. This prompts students to develop initial models to explain how buying candy could impact orangutans.Students spend the first lesson set better understanding the complexity of the problem, which cannot be solved with simple solutions. They will figure out that palm oil is derived from the oil palm trees that grow near the equator, and that these trees are both land-efficient and provide stable income for farmers, factors that make finding a solution to the palm oil problem more challenging. Students will establish the need for a better design for oil palm farms, which will support both orangutans and farmers. The final set of lessons engage students in investigations of alternative approaches to growing food compared to large-scale monocrop farms. Students work to design an oil palm farm that simultaneously supports orangutan populations and the income of farmers and community members.

This unit on Earth’s resources and human impact begins with students observing news stories and headlines of drought and flood events across the United States. Students figure out that these drought and flood events are not normal and that both kinds of events seem to be related to rising temperatures. This prompts them to develop an initial model to explain how rising temperatures could cause both droughts and floods and leads students to wonder what could cause rising temperatures, too. This initial work sets students up to ask questions related to the query: How do changes in Earth’s system impact our communities and what can we do about it?Students spend the first lesson set gathering evidence for how a change in temperature affects evaporation, precipitation, and other parts of Earth’s water system. They use evidence to support a scientific explanation that two climate variables (temperature and precipitation) are changing precipitation patterns in the case sites they investigated. Students figure out that the rising temperatures are caused by an imbalance in Earth’s carbon system, resulting in a variety of problems in different communities. The unit ends with students evaluating different kinds of solutions to these problems and how they are implemented in communities. Students work through a systematic evaluation process to consider (1) each solution’s potential to solve the carbon imbalance, (2) tradeoffs associated with solutions based on student-identified constraints, and (3) whether the solution in question makes sense for their community’s stakeholders.

OpenSciEd Demo VideoOpenSciEd Scope & Sequence VideoCSDE Model Curricula Quick Start GuideEquitable and Inclusive Curriculum  The CSDE believes in providing a set of conditions where learners are repositioned at the center of curricula planning and design. Curricula, from a culturally responsive perspective, require intentional planning for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the development of units and implementation of lessons. It is critical to develop a learning environment that is relevant to and reflective of students’ social, cultural, and linguistic experiences to effectively connect their culturally and community-based knowledge to the class. Begin by connecting what is known about students’ cognitive and interdisciplinary diversity to the learning of the unit. Opposed to starting instructional planning with gaps in students’ knowledge, plan from an asset-based perspective by starting from students’ strengths. In doing so, curricula’s implementation will be grounded in instruction that engages, motivates, and supports the intellectual capacity of all students.Course Description: Using 3-Dimesional design pedagogy, Connecticut’s NGSS employ: Science/Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI’s) and Crosscutting Concepts that are used to make up Student Expectations:Each year, students in Connecticut should be able to demonstrate greater capacity for connecting knowledge across, and between, the physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering design. During Grade 8, students will begin to form deeper connections between concepts previously learned in grades K–7, such as collecting evidence and drawing conclusions, understanding relationships between objects, and critical thinking that leads to designing effective solutions for problems. Upon completion of Grade 8, students should have a deeper understanding of: • Physical and theoretical forces and contact;• The Earth and its place in space;• Natural selection and evolution, and; • Concepts of genetics and heredity.Aligned Core Resources:Core resources is a local control decision.  Ensuring alignment of resources to the standards is critical for success. The CSDE has identified OpenSciEd as a highly aligned core resource after a rigorous review process. Additional Course Information: NGSS has unique features. To better understand the make-up of NGSS visit the following website for a more detailed break-down of the CT Science standards from which this curriculum was based. Nextgenscience Assessment Information:To support teachers with being able to use the OpenSciEd instructional materials, a set of professional learning resources has been developed that accompany each unit. All of the resources can be accessed by adding them to your Google Drive or by downloading into Microsoft Office documents from the Google Drive folder using the links below. To access the student and teacher versions of these units, visit the Instructional Materials Page.Additionally, the Connecticut State Department of Education has developed NGSS interim Assessment blocks specific to the grade 6-8 grade band. These can be accessed through the CSDE Website in the Performance Office tab.ELA/Math Transferable Skills Addressed in the Course: The following Practices Venn Diagram illustrates the connections and commonalities in the major content areas. This diagram attempts to cluster practices and capacities that have similar tenets and/or significant overlaps in the student expectations. Likewise, we have placed practices and capacities within the disciplinary domains if there was not a significant overlap or relationship to another discipline. One could argue certain practices/capacities could be placed in other positions within the Venn diagram. These placements are not definitive and the intention of the standards documents may not have conceptualized the three disciplinary areas In this manner. ​​

Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.

In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.

This unit launches with a slow-motion video of a speaker as it plays music. In the previous unit, students developed a model of sound. This unit allows students to investigate the cause of a speaker’s vibration in addition to the effect.Students dissect speakers to explore the inner workings, and engineer homemade cup speakers to manipulate the parts of the speaker. They identify that most speakers have the same parts–a magnet, a coil of wire, and a membrane. Students investigate each of these parts to figure out how they work together in the speaker system. Along the way, students manipulate the components (e.g. changing the strength of the magnet, number of coils, direction of current) to see how this technology can be modified and applied to a variety of contexts, like MagLev trains, junkyard magnets, and electric motors.

Humans have always been driven by noticing, recording, and understanding patterns and by trying to figure out how we fit within much larger systems. In this unit, students begin observing the repeating biannual pattern of the Sun setting perfectly aligned between buildings in New York City along particular streets and then try to explain additional patterns in the sky that they and others have observed. Students draw on their own experiences and the stories of family or community members to brainstorm a list of patterns in the sky. And listen to a series of podcasts highlighting indigenous astronomies from around the world that emphasize how patterns in the sky set the rhythms for their lives, their communities, and all life on Earth, and these are added to their growing list of related phenomena (other patterns in the sky people have observed).In the first two lesson sets (Lessons 1–5 and 6–7), students develop models for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Sun-Moon systems that explain some of the patterns in the sky that they have identified, including seasons, eclipses, and lunar phases. In the third lesson set (Lessons 8–12), students investigate a series of related phenomena motivated by their questions and ideas for investigations. In the final lesson set (Lessons 13–17), students explore the remaining questions on their Driving Question Board, related to planets and other objects farther out in space (beyond the stars they can see with the unaided eye).

This unit on genetics starts out with students noticing and wondering about photos of two cattle, one of whom has significantly more muscle than the other. The students then observe photos of other animals with similar differences in musculature: dogs, fish, rabbits, and mice. After developing initial models for the possible causes of these differences in musculature, students explore a collection of photos showing a range of visible differences.In the first lesson set, students use videos, photos, data sets, and readings to investigate what causes an animal to get extra-big muscles. Students figure out how muscles typically develop as a result of environmental factors such as exercise and diet. Then, students work with cattle pedigrees, including data about chromosomes and proteins, to figure out genetic factors that influence the heavily muscled phenotype and explore selective breeding in cattle. In the second lesson set, students use what they’ve learned from explaining cattle musculature to help them explain other trait variations they’ve seen. They investigate plant reproduction, including selective breeding and asexual reproduction (in plants and other organisms) and other examples of traits that are influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Students figure out that environmental and genetic factors together play a role in the differences we see among living things.

This activity proposes different small experiments and discussions to show that in the summer it is cooler by the sea than on the land and that water cools off more slowly than soil.

Students use the robot paths they documented during the associated Robots on Ice Engineering Challenge activity to learn about and then make artwork. During the previous activity, students recorded the path of their robots through a maze in order to collect data during a remote research simulation. Now, they take a new look at the robot paths, seeing them from an art perspective as continuous line drawings. Students learn about Picasso’s famous works of art that used the same technique. Then they learn the artistic definition of a line and see examples of how it is used in different art pieces; they practice making continuous line drawings and then create sculptures of their drawings using colorful wire. A PowerPoint® presentation is provided to guide the activity.

Bluetooth is everywhere—from smartphones to computers to cars. Even though students are exposed to this technology, many are not aware of how they can use it themselves to wirelessly control their own creative projects! For this challenge, students build on what they learned during a previous Arduino maker challenge, Make and Control a Servo Arm with Your Computer, and learn how to control a servo with an Android phone (iPhones do not work with the components used in this challenge). By the end of the exercise, expect students to be wirelessly controlling a servo with a simple phone application!

In this activity, students use a variety of materials to design and create headphones that absorb sound.

Students teams design and build shoe prototypes that convert between high heels and athletic shoes. They apply their knowledge about the mechanics of walking and running as well as shoe design (as learned in the associated lesson) to design a multifunctional shoe that is both fashionable and functional.

Students act as mining engineers and simulate ore mining production by using chocolate chip cookies. They focus on the cost-benefit analysis of the chocolate ore production throughout the simulation, which helps them understand the cost of production. As students “mine” with tools such as paperclips and toothpicks, they keep records of their costs—land (cookie), equipment used, cookie size before and after production, and time spent. While the goal is to make as much profit as possible, other costs and goals are taken into consideration—as in real-world mining engineering. For example, mining engineers also consider the resulting amount of destruction to the lithosphere when deciding the best method to obtain ore. Thus, a line item for land reclamation cost is included from the beginning. A provided worksheet serves as a profit and loss statement.