Perform Lab Exercise 1: Tuning Into Creation (3-4 hrs)

Transcript

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Welcome to our first lab exercise. What I want to do in this particular lab is to get you out into God’s creation and get you used to looking at it. We’re going to use this method in a few of the labs here at the beginning. We’re going to try to get you out there to see the actual organisms that we’re going to be studying in the course of the course, and get used to observing the world about us. This is a good thing to get in the practice of doing in general. In science, if you’re going to go into science, observation is key. Getting out there used to looking at those things that you’re studying and examining them closely. That’s what we want to begin to do in this particular lab. Also, we’re going to learn in this course that one of our responsibilities is to be good rulers over those things that are made. We need to understand those things if we’re going to rule over those things well. We need to study those things. We need to be aware of those things. We need to see them. We need to understand them in order to rule well over them. So this lab is encouraging you to take a closer look at the creation around you so you can be a better ruler over those things that are made.

Thirdly, it’s also a fact that in this class we’re going to learn that God has created physical illustrations in the biological world to teach us about Him. We won’t see those things or learn those things if we don’t actually observe. So getting out there and observing the biological creation helps us see those things that God wants to use to teach us about Him. So again, the purpose of this is just to get you out there and to begin the process of looking at the creation. It’s rather simple. Straightforward. Get yourself a meter stick. All these things are explained in the lab, of course. You have a meter stick, an unlined piece of paper, and a pencil. Go out and find a place to lay out a square, one meter by one meter or one yard by one yard, if you want to do it that way.

You’re going to be examining everything inside that square. Now, it might be wherever you’re at at the time that you’re doing this that it’s not appropriate to do this outside. Perhaps you’ve got 12 feet of snow outside or something like that. If that’s the case, then I encourage you to find a place where organisms are available and are out and active. For example, maybe at a zoo. Finding an indoor building at a zoo where they’ve got a bunch of organisms on display, or at an arboretum, or at an aquarium, where you can go to that location and maybe you can’t lay out a square, but you can at least imagine a yard by yard by yard square and then study the organisms in that square.

Once you’ve got your plot laid out, however it is you’re laying it out, I want you to take your piece of paper, draw a square on it, a large square as large as you can get on the piece of paper, and that’s going to be the corresponding to the plot that you have in the real world there. And you’re going to be drawing those things in the square that you find in your plot. But I also want you to label all this stuff. It’s very important in science when we make our observations and record the observations that we make notes of where we made those observations, when we made those observations, and so on.

So I want you on this sheet of paper to indicate the name of the lab, the date, the time of day would be useful, the weather conditions that are going on at that particular time, the geographical location, where you’re at, maybe GPS units, street address, something that would allow people to go back and check to make sure that what you actually saw actually was there.

The direction of north in that, and you can do that if you don’t have a compass. You might do that according to where the Sun comes up in the east and sets in the west. You can infer the direction of north. Record all of those kind of observations on your paper, and then start taking a close look at your plot. Find the plants, the animals, everything that you can find in that plot, draw it on your piece of paper’s plot. And to the extent that you can, identify the various things. Okay, maybe you don’t know the scientific names for them, or even the non-scientific names for them. Create names for the things that are different so that you can distinguish among and between them. In this way, and get as close in there as you can. Check around. Check under leaves. Make sure you catch everything, especially things that are moving around, like the animals that happen to be in there. I want you to see as much as you can see. Spend some time at this. Relax and enjoy it, and get as much information out of your plot as you can. [BLANK_AUDIO]