Behavior Over Time Graphs

Behavior Over Time Graphs, or BOTGs, are a component of Systems Thinking.  Systems Thinking is the process of understanding how things influence other things within a whole system.  This year in social studies we are going to do a lot with Systems Thinking (as I've previously posted about), so today we started off introducing the basics of Systems Thinking with BOTGs.

We first started off by watching the above screencast about what BOTGs are, and then practiced "reading" and "telling the story" of BOTGs from ones we looked at.  We also went through this presentation to go in-depth further with what BOTGs are and do some more practice or not only making them, but telling the story a BOTG we looked at was telling us.

Students were then unleashed to create their own BOTGs over the National Geographic documentary Six Degrees Could Change the World that we spent time watching and analyzing the different "problems" (or, as the students would discover, things that are changing) that our world would come across with climate change.

For having never done anything with BOTGs before, these students blew me away: they embraced this new form of "graphing" or "reporting" and created many different BOTGs that identified the different changes over time that could/are happening with climate change.

We'll be diving in soon to other components of Systems Thinking, so stay tuned for more posts soon! :)