TASK
The goal of this project is to grapple with the time scale of life on earth. You will generate a history of life on earth in any medium of your choosing with the following restrictions (refer to the rubric for point breakdown):
1. The representation must be on a linear scale (not logarithmic)
Linear scale means each year is given the same weight in your scaling. In other words, you don’t have different symbols or measurements equate a different number of years to make it easier to see everything on one page. Instead, you present the years in a way that really helps you visualize just how long Earth has been around compared to how short an amount of time humans have been on earth, for example.
2. You must include a legend that allows us to interpret how you’re representing the time since each event has occurred (e.g., 1cm = 1000 years, 1mL = 100,000 years, 1 second = 10,000 years)
3. The only format that will get you no points for creative effort is a simple drawing of a timeline or creation of a checklist. Making a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation, or using images directly from the internet, will not get you full points, but is acceptable. You can make:
Musical piece
Short story or poem
Video or TikTok
Painting/watercolor/collage or other visual art
Sculpture
Diorama
etc.
Note: Even if you do something incredibly creative, you will still lose points if the scale of time is not depicted appropriately
4. You must include the following important events:
Start of life (~3.8 GYA[1])
Origin of eukaryotes (~2–3.5 GYA – your choice within that range)
Origin of multicellularity (~2 GYA)
Origin of Homo sapiens(~200 KYA)
Present time (0 YA)
5. You must include at least 3 other events. The events must relate to the history of Earth, not human history. You will need to find the dates of these (I suggest Google Scholar, Timed Tree of Life, a university’s website, or other scientific sources – don’t use a random science website, or Wikipedia by itself). Here are some suggestions, but you are not limited to these:
Formation of Earth
Oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere
Origin of vertebrates
Mass extinctions
Origin of land animals and land plants
Origin of mammals
Origin and/or Extinction of dinosaurs
Turn in by the deadline:
A picture or video of your creation, or other appropriate file (e.g., document for a written piece, a sound file for an audio creation)
A key or legend explaining how to interpret your creation (if appropriate)
A list of the 3+ events you have added, their associated dates, and the scientific source (see #5 above) from which you got those dates. Please cite your source in APA format.
EXAMPLES (Note: the measurements included below are arbitrary– use what makes sense to you so long as it’s a linear representation i.e., everything is measured the same way):
You make a boardgame to represent life on earth, with the events equating a specific tile on the game. Each block on the game’s board equals 10,000 years.
You do a different dance for each event and perform the dance for the number of seconds each event occurred in the past; 1 second of dancing = 1,000 years.
You measure the distance from a basketball hoop and stop at each event to do a free-throw; 1 cm = 100,000 years.
[1]GYA = billion (“giga-”) years ago; KYA = thousand (“kila-”) years ago
