I first did this mind map to help me write this reflection. The mind map shows mostly the things we have covered in things we have covered in this unit. So the "big idea of this unit was to understand how to balance between man and natural environment, transform resources into human goods, and understand us and management of natural resources. I think things that helped me really understand these things were projects like the packaging project, this helped me understand the transformation of the natural resources we have into things that we want (sometimes need). Another thing that helped us understand the bid idea was the blog posts we did. These gave us a chance to reflect back on each new thing we learned and doing them online is much easier and more fun. Last but not least, Watching the films really made the information stick. This is because it gave us visuals that really stuck in your head like, for example, the eggs in the Human Footprint.The question for this unit was, What is a necessity and how does an organism ensure the survival of it's species within it's environment?. Well a necessity is something that is not wanted but needed. If this thing is not obtained it has dangerous and maybe even life-threating effects on the organism. For example, food, water and oxygen are all necessities for humans because we need these things to survive. I think an organisms ensure the survival of it's species by adapting to it's natural environment and then reproducing so that the next generation is then fully suited for the environment which it enters. This unit question helped us to view survival through the areas of interactions. How? Well we were shown that everything almost "interlocks" in a way. This means that everything you do effects a chain, which effects another chain and so on. Even if you are not face to face, or touching the other organism or environment you can still effect it. In this unit I would have liked to have more of these hand ons thing. Becasue the whole unit we talked about how we effect the environment so it really just made you want to get out there and help. So I think we should have gone out and seen first-hand what mega-pollution is really like and then maybe helped by cleaning. From my point of view we covered all of these thing quite well, the ecosystems part with naming the exact species in an ecosystem, etc. we never really elaborated on, but I think that would be taking it to the next level. So all in all I think it was a fun but long unit.
