In the past few weeks, I have continued to work on my ocean plastic simulation. I have focused on fixing problems in the simulation such as figuring at how to make new plastic enter the simulation consistently. I also worked on keeping the populations surviving for a longer time and from not getting overpopulated. In order to do this, I ran the simulation without adding in plastic. This allowed me to focus on the problems that were occurring within the populations, regardless of the plastic that was being added. This helped me to understand why some species were dying off and why other species were becoming overpopulated. I then worked to fix some of these issues. I added commands that would limit the amount of organisms that each species could have. This helped the simulation to not get flooded with too many organisms of one species, which often caused the program to crash. I was also able to increase the rate of survival of the sea turtles, because they had been quickly dying out most of the time. After fixing most of the issues with the populations, I was able to add the plastic back in. Overall, the program began working a lot smoother.
One of the other main things that I have been working on was figuring out how to take data from the simulation. Even though the simulation is not done yet, I wanted to explore how to download the data onto my computer and what the capabilities I had with using the data. By taking time to figure out how I can access the data and how I can create graphs from it, I will be able to more easily take data when I am at that stage in my project. One thing that I still need to work out how to do is keeping all of my data organized. I can imagine that it will be easy to mix data files up or accidentally add the same data in multiple times, therefore skewing the results. In order to have accurate data, I will need to figure out a. system to organize my data.
0 Comments
Over the past week, I began focusing on creating my simulation of ocean plastics. I began by setting up the basics of my simulation -- getting each species created, creating the plastic, and setting up the basic features of the simulation such as movement of the organisms. After I had the basics of my simulation working, I wrote out an outline of the simulation. The outline worked out the interactions between different species, the steps that will happen in my simulation, and the ways that organisms can die and how they can survive. By outlining everything that will happen in my simulation, I now have a clearer picture of what I will need to program in order to get my simulation to work the way that I need it to. Furthermore, I will use this outline to keep my on track with my simulation by making sure that my simulation aligns with the outline. After I finished working on the outline, I began to work on the actual simulation, focusing on different aspects of my simulation that I developed in my outline. I ran into some challenges along the way when I did not know how to add more plastic to the simulation after a set period of time. After trying many different ways to get this to work, I finally was able to get more plastic to add to the simulation every 50 turns. Essentially what happens is that every time that the plastic turns to Microplastic, new plastic is added to the simulation. Overtime, the plastic all builds up, causing the animals to die out and the screen to become increasingly filled with plastic. Overall, this process has allowed me to make big strides in my program so far. Below, you can see some pictures from my simulation.
|
Overview of my InquiryIn this inquiry I hope to learn about how our ocean ecosystems work, the effect of ocean plastics on our oceans, and what we can do to lessen the effects of ocean plastics, through research. Once I have my background knowledge, I hope to be able to take what I learned and model it in a programmed biological simulation using starlogo nova, which is a programming language. My simulation will be able to vary the amount of plastic that reaches the oceans, the toxicity of the plastics to the ocean life, and the amount of ocean creatures in order to take data from the simulation on how ocean plastics affect ecosystems and what makes a healthy ocean ecosystem. Once I finish working on the simulation I will write up a summary explaining what I learned and connecting it back to what we can do to help our ocean ecosystems. Through this, I will be learning about scientific writing.
Categories |