INTRODUCTION

"I find the ideas in the fractals, both as a body of knowledge and as a metaphor, an incredibly important way of looking at the world."
Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore

This WebQuest is intended to have learners use collaboration, creativity, and internet resources to see how human body structures and especially lungs can be explained through fractal geometry.

Do you know that there is something in common between your own body, galaxy structures, and cauliflower? Have you ever wondered how rivers resemble trees that resemble our blood vessels? In this WebQuest, we are going to take a journey during which we will explore these questions discovering some beautiful structures called fractals.

But before that, here are a few things you will need to know:

TASK

The goal of this WebQuest is to help you discover the importance of making interconnections between different areas of knowledge. In the case of this WebQuest, they will be mainly biology (with special attention to anatomy and lungs) and mathematics (fractal geometry).

So, let’s start our investigation and have a look at the beautiful fractal universe within us.

The learners should work in groups of 5 to 10 people. They should explore the concept of fractals and discover their structure within the human lungs. Each of them should prepare a short PP presentation (or other multimedia) on another part of the human body having a fractal structure (blood vessels, kidneys, etc.) The information should be well organized, factual, and well-formed. It is important to demonstrate a good level of internet and technology use

PROCESS

RESOURCES

What is “fractal”?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fractal#note-1 
https://www.britannica.com/science/fractal 
https://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/IntroToFrac/welcome.html 
https://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_and_the_art_of_roughness 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx_0cdogaZ8&feature=youtu.be 

Structure, function, and development of human lungs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kacMYexDgHg 
https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-1-2.html 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474667016387791 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC2hWizvWa4 
https://www.visiblebody.com/learn/respiratory/lower-respiratory-system 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kacMYexDgHg 
https://www.physio-pedia.com/Lung_Anatomy 
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-respiratory-system/Blood-vessels-lymphatic-vessels-and-nerves 
https://medivizor.com/blog/2017/08/24/facts-lungs/ 

Other fractal structures in human anatomy:
http://www.fractal.org/Life-Science-Technology/Publications/Fractals-and-Human-Biology.pdf 
https://www.medicographia.com/2013/01/fractals-and-their-contribution-to-biology-and-medicine/ 
http://www.iawwai.com/FractalBrains.html 

CONCLUSION

Through this WebQuest you experienced the fact that human body is fundamentally fractal.

Thus, it follows basic structures that dominate our world and the universe as a whole on different scales.

Most people find fractals relaxing and beautiful. Please, watch this video (or just a part of it) and discover if you find them soothing, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTiZD7p_oTc

If so, discuss why. Could it be because we unconsciously discover a fundamental principle of the structure of our own body in the fractals we watch? Anyway, by analyzing the nature of beauty we are already in the realm of aesthetics, which is yet another area of knowledge.

Skills:

• Presentation skills
• Critical thinking
• Research

In addition, learners will:

• realize that areas of knowledge are interconnected and this is crucial for their development;
• learn how to engage and collaborate with others;
• communicate an idea by means of a discussion;
• develop a sense of confidence and belief in themselves and their ideas;
• learn how to communicate effectively (using written and spoken word, non-verbal language, electronic tools, and listening skills).

Evaluation of learning achievements

In this section we will not dive very deep into the underlying educational theories about evaluation and testing: there’s too much out there than we could possibly cover in this small project report.

Instead, we want to concentrate on procedures that enable both students/pupils and their teachers to establish if the learning goals of the Webquest were achieved and, if so, to what extent. We recommend teachers make use of a combined evaluation procedure, that consists of:

1. Statements by learners (after being asked to do so)
   • telling what they learned about the subject (knowledge-oriented self-evaluation): now (after going through the Webquest) I know that …
   • telling what he/she learned about herself/himself (formative evaluation, in this case, diagnostic self-evaluation): now (after going through the Webquest) I know about myself that I …
     This pair of basic statements add up to a so-called learner report, in which the pupil/student reflects on what the Webquest brought him/her in terms of acquired knowledge and new personal views and attitudes concerning the subject.

   For instance:

   • ‘I learned that in medieval times the hygiene of people was hardly a concern which helped to let epidemic diseases like the Plague cause so many casualties’ Or:
   • ‘I learned the facts and I know the earth is warming, but I cannot understand why people were so stupid to pollute the world and let it warm up so much.
   • ‘I learned from the information about diseases that this subject is more appealing to me than I would expect in advance: maybe I should consider a medical career’. Or:
     ‘The Webquests confirms what I thought already: I could not care less about the climate and global warming. In fact, I thought it was all a hoax and I still do!’

   This kind of assessment seems more subjective than it actually is: in his standard work on testing and evaluation (and much more), simply called Methodology (1974), Prof. A.D. de Groot described how consistent the student’s self-evaluations appeared to be: when asked again after 5 or 10 years, their evaluation would almost be the same. De Groot advised teachers to use the learner report as a start for joint evaluations, striving for consensus between teacher and student/pupil about the learning outcomes and their value for the learner, but also compared with the learning objectives as stated in the curriculum.

2. The learning achievements are visible in the output produced by the students: it is physical evidence: reports, answers to questions asked in the Webquest, presentations, and performance during presentations (preferably recorded). The teacher completes an evaluation grid stating clearly what the learning outcomes for the student/pupil are. The categories in the grid can be modified by the teacher to cover more precisely the content of a Webquest.

   >We advise teachers to use the grid to start a joint evaluation discussion, aiming at consensus or at least understanding between the teacher and the student/pupil about the learning outcomes: were they achieved (as planned in the curriculum and communicated before the Webquest started) and to what extent? To communicate the learning goals clearly before any learning activity starts, is a transparency requirement that is widely acknowledged in the educational community. The history of making learning objectives explicit goes back to the evaluation ‘Bible’ by Bloom, Hastings and Madaus: ‘Handbook on formative and summative evaluation of student learning’ (1971), a standard work that also served as inspiration for the earlier mentioned Prof. De Groot.

The procedure also applies when students/pupils have worked together on a Webquest. The teacher will ask questions about individual contributions: ‘What did you find? What part did you write? How did you find the illustrations? Who made  the final presentation?’

All the evidence (of learning efforts and outcomes plus joint evaluations) is preferably stored in the learning portfolio of the student, or in any other suitable storage system (folders with written or printed documents, online collection of files, etcetera ).

Changes in personal points of view and feelings are harder to value and here the consensus between teacher and student/pupil about experiences during the learning process provides essential insights.

The grid below gives an example of how the evaluation of the learning process and achievements can be shaped: what kind of reactions to the Webquest does the teacher expect and how valuable are they? Is the teacher capable to explain the value or score allocated to answers or presentations given by pupils? Does the pupil/student understand the evaluation outcomes, and does he/she agree? If an agreement (consensus is not possible, it is still the teacher who decides how to value the student’s work.

Please note that the text in the grid addresses the pupil/student directly: this is important and it is in fact a prerequisite for using such an evaluation grid: it is specifically meant to enable a discussion of learning results between teacher and student and not to communicate learning achievements of learners to others who had no direct role in the Webquest.

Evaluation Grid