Concepts:

The idea is to teach the scientific method and the interrelationship between math and science by the mechanism of studying circadian rhythms. The circadian rhythms occurs widely in nature from the periodic chirping of cicada and other crickets to the periodicity of human sleep and to the periodicity in many chemical reactions. The complexity that can exist in all these systems can and does lead to chaos and to the strange behavior of non-linear systems characterized by apparent random behavior, but with clusters of periodicity. Our goal is to investigate a number of systems experimentally and in a systematic way plotting out one manner or another to find something about the behavior of these systems. We then need to make some sense of our findings and in today's usual approach we might like to express our knowledge using some kind of computer model. We may then use the computer model to add to our understanding of the natural system.