Resilience In-Class Activity – Resilience Active Learning Module
Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb stress or disturbance while retaining its
essential characteristics and processes. In this exercise, you will create a structure and
then test its resilience by putting it under different stresses. Think of your structure as a
seed pod: the essential ecological characteristic of your structure is that it holds and
protects the ping-pong ball inside it.
1. Build a structure to hold a ping-pong ball.
Using only the materials you’ve been given, create a structure that will hold the pingpong ball. You should take a maximum of 10 minutes to complete your structure. Once
it’s done, let us know and we’ll bring you a ping-pong ball to put inside.
2. Submit your structure to stresses and disturbances.
Come up with a list of disturbances (e.g. dropping, spinning) with which to test the
resilience of your structure, and then test it. For each stress/disturbance that your
structure undergoes, record the type of disturbance, and how the shape of your structure
responds to it. Include whether or not the structure succeeds in holding the ping-pong
ball before and after the disturbance.
Disturbance
Response
Holds the ball?
3. Predict your structure’s response to other stresses, and add them to the table.
Can you imagine other disturbances that might affect (or not affect) your structure and its
ability to hold the ball? Add them to the table. For example, how would fire affect the
structure? How would it respond to being immersed in water, as if in a flood?
Draw a box-and-arrow diagram that shows how your structure responded to different
stresses, similar to the diagram for an egg.
One box or state will be the original state of your structure when you created it, holding
the ping-pong ball. To figure out what your other states are, look at the responses in your
table above and group the ones that have similar effects together. For example, both
dropping an egg and pushing too hard on an egg will result in a broken egg. Thus, one of
the states in the egg diagram is a “Broken Egg”. Draw arrows between states that are
related and label them with the disturbance/stresses that would cause one state to shift to
another state.
For discussion:
Briefly answer each of the following questions with your group and be ready to discuss
your answers in class.
Which disturbances was your structure able to absorb without losing the ping-pong ball?
Which disturbances caused your structure to lose the ping-pong ball? Was your structure
resilient to those disturbances?
What are the effects of materials that you built the structure out of on the overall
resilience of the structure? Did they respond similarly or differently to the different
stresses? Do you think that additional materials would have helped your structure hold
the ball? Would you leave out any materials next time?
Does the magnitude of the disturbance matter for the resilience of your structure? For
example, are the effects of placing your student ID vs. your textbook on top of the
structure different?
Does the scale of the disturbance matter for the resilience of the structure? For example,
what if you push on one part of the structure vs. the whole structure at once?
Homework Assignment:
Like the different structures you created, ecosystems have varying degrees and types of
resilience. One reason for this is that they are composed of different, interacting
organisms that change over time and react differently to disturbances. Following the
process that you used above, create a simple box-and-arrow model of forest ecosystem
how it responds to different disturbances. Write a one-page explanation of your model
that describes the different states you drew, the disturbances that cause shifts between
them and the resilience of the ecosystem.