On December 12 and 13, students in Mr. Mark Sunkel’s AP Environmental Science class take part in an activity to discover the relationship between the difficulty of obtaining a resource and its cost.

The simulation included a large tub filled with overburden sand, with small beans or “nuggets” spread throughout. The beans represented gold nuggets while the sand represented the soil and overburden in which the nuggets are buried.

The students represented the mining companies that discover the gold. Taking turns, each lab group collected as many nuggets as they could within a given time limit for each session.

Throughout the activity, the students observed that the extraction of the gold nuggets was slow and limited at first, but then increased as time went on, and in general, they learned that the exploitation of most natural resources is slow and sporadic at the start with the demand increasing later on.

“Participating in this simulation really gave us a hands-on way to study and learn more about the topic of natural resource depletion, rather than just taking notes off of a PowerPoint. The activity was very interactive and helped me understand the material a lot better,” said Class of 2019 member Jade Pack.