How do animals regulate their body temperature?

The workshop asks students to investigate different morphological, physiological and behavioral characteristics of animals and that help their thermal regulation, either to adapt to changes in temperature or extreme temperatures.

Each group of students will investigate a specific mechanism of thermal regulation (sheep's wool, rabbit ears or grouping of penguins) and experiment with the available models in order to understand and analyze the effect of the regulation mechanism. analyzed. When obtaining the results, the students will contrast the results obtained with their initial hypotheses and will have to build a new scientific explanation that will allow to explain the results obtained in the experiment. Students delve into the idea of ​​energy transfer between the individual and the environment and the influence of physiological characteristics (surface, volume, thermal conductivity…).


At the end of the workshop, the experiments carried out by each of the groups will be shared, and a joint explanation will be built on how each of the mechanisms involved in regulating body temperature and how these are adaptation mechanisms that guarantee the survival of individuals.


The main conceptual contents of the workshop from Physics are the idea of ​​energy transfer between individual and environment, and how this can be greater or lesser depending on the difference in temperature, the area of ​​contact and how the materials which are in the middle facilitate or hinder this transfer. From a biology point of view, the workshop aims for students to construct the idea of ​​adapting individuals to the environment as what has allowed individuals of the species to survive.


At the same time, the workshop also promotes the learning of procedural content such as the development of hypotheses, the control of variables in experimental design, the interpretation of graphs and the elaboration of conclusions based on the interpretation of results. Finally, the expected learning of epistemic content revolves around how science uses ideal models to explain real-world phenomena, and the importance of imagination, creativity, and group argumentation to build the best explanations in the world. things that happen around us.