Population Growth.

  The other day as I sat in the lobby of the hotel, doing some people and bird watching, I wondered if I could present population growth in a slightly different way than normal.

Since I work in a small village with a population of between 900 and 1000 people population growth is not as evident. If school numbers are indicative of the population, it has been following a fairly circular increase and decrease, never going over a certain number.

I'd love to find enough information to have students calculate the population growth of the village but it has stayed pretty steady with the number of people who leave the village and those born. I'm not even sure where I'd find those numbers.

I know it is traditional to use bacteria or humans but I think for my students, if we did popular growth based on animals such as village dogs, moose, or other local animal, students might relate to these a bit more before I try to introduce human population growth.  In addition, it would be good to discuss what happened to that deer population when they removed the predators and the results.

Too often we teach population growth as if its nothing more than a mathematical equation or set of equations.  It's important to show students that as population increases,  there is an increased consumption of materials, production of trash, and an increased production of food with a decrease in available fertile land.

When we apply the formula to the growth of bacteria, we need to explain why it is important to know how to calculate this.  Ask students if an increase in bacterial population coincides with an increase in disease.  Do outbreaks follow the tendency for populations to outstrip the production of food and resources before declining?  Does consumption increase at the same pace as the growth of the population or is it faster?  

I'd love for students to understand that although the population is increasing right now, it is not increasing at the same rate equally around the world.  It would be nice to break down the daily increase to see where most of the growth occurs before having them venture guesses on why it happens that way.

This is one case where it is easy to show connections between population, consumption, food production, and how patterns of growth change. 

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.

Population Growth

  In the same chapter that has interest formulas, there are formulas for population growth and radio active decay.

Answering the question of why do we need to know half life of radio active elements is easy.  Since we have to dispose of the waste from power plants, x-rays, etc we need to know how long they need to be buried but when asked about population growth that can be a much harder thing.

So why do we need to be able to predict population growth?
We need to predict growth for:
1. Figuring out how much housing is needed for the additional population.
2. Deciding the number of cars that will be traveling the roads which determines how many new roads should be built or how many roads need to be expanded.
3. How many portables will be needed to added to the local schools for the increasing population or will new schools be needed? What about colleges?
4.  How much more money will be needed for the growing population in the over 65 sector?
5. How much more food needs to be grown to keep up with the increasing population?
6.  How much more demand for energy will the increased population require?

If students visited local census records, they could find enough points to calculate the growth of their city or country using a spread sheet.  Once the rate has been calculated, students can use that rate of growth to predict the population in 10, 20, 30, or 50 years.  Using the rate of new house construction, they can project if there will be enough housing available in 10 years for the predicted population.

This would create a connection between the theoretical and the real use of calculating population growth.