S&P+Technology


 * Standard 1.0 Skills and Processes**: Students will demonstrate the thinking and acting inherent in the practice of science.
 * ~ Grade 8 ||
 * **Topic D.** Technology ||
 * **1.** Explain that complex systems require control mechanisms. ||
 * **a.** Explain that the choice of materials for a job depends on their properties and on how they interact with other materials. ||
 * **b.** Demonstrate that all control systems have inputs, outputs, and feedback. ||
 * **c.** Realize that design usually requires taking constraints into account. (Some constraints, such as gravity or the properties of the materials to be used, are unavoidable. Other constraints, including economic, political, social, ethical, and aesthetic ones also limit choices.) ||
 * **d.** Identify reasons that systems fail-they have faulty or poorly matched parts, are used in ways that exceed what was intended by the design, or were poorly designed to begin with. ||
 * **2.** Analyze, design, assemble and troubleshoot complex systems. ||
 * **a.** Provide evidence that a system can include processes as well as things. ||
 * **b.** Explain that thinking about things as systems means looking for how every part relates to others. (The output from one part of a system (which can include material, energy, or information) can become the input to other parts. Such feedback can serve to control what goes on in the system as a whole.) ||
 * **c.** Analyze any system to determine its connection, both internally and externally to other systems and explain that a system may be thought of as containing subsystems and as being a subsystem of a larger system. ||
 * **3.** Analyze the value and the limitations of different types of models in explaining real things and processes. ||
 * **a.** Explain that the kind of model to use and how complex it should be depends on its purpose and that it is possible to have different models used to represent the same thing. ||
 * **b.** Explain, using examples that models are often used to think about processes that happen too slowly, too quickly, or on too small a scale to observe directly, or that are too vast to be changed deliberately, or that are potentially dangerous. ||
 * **c.** Explain that models may sometimes mislead by suggesting characteristics that are not really shared with what is being modeled. ||