One of the first labs I do with AP Bio in our Natural Selection unit, is this butterfly lab from Kim Foglia. I just converted her lab to a google doc and also have a google sheet linked to it where my students record their data. I like for them to be able to see everyone's data and to be able to compare.
The first year I did this lab, I collected some squares of cardboard and glued different fabrics on each. I think all but one of the fabrics were fat quarters. Then I used a standard hole punch to punch out 5 different colors of "butterflies." It was a little painful punching that many holes the first year, but I've gotten several years of use out of them since, so I guess it was worth it. For each of the fabrics, there is at least one color of "butterfly" that blends in incredibly well. Each environment will see a shift in the frequencies of different colors of butterflies, but it'll be different color shifts.
The students have enjoyed it each time we've done this lab and it gives a good picture of what is going on with natural selection.
Here is the link to the lab as a google doc. And here is the link to the google sheet I made for data collection. There are also links to this in the lab itself. Generally, I only print the last 4 pages of the lab for students and have them access the first three pages electronically through Google Classroom.
This week both of my classes (high school level Biology and AP Biology) did a termite lab. I love both of these labs. In general, I'm not a big fan of bugs. Dissecting grasshoppers grosses me out. But termites--I just tell myself they're little white ants. Fortunately, you are supposed to avoid touching the termites, so we use paintbrushes to move them around. No complaints here about that! They're pretty low maintenance too. I order a 25 pack of worker termites from Carolina. Both years I've ordered them, Carolina has been generous with the termites, and we've had at least 40 in the package.
In HS level Biology our termite lab is part of our evolution unit. This lab emphasizes the adaptations of the termites and how that helps them to live to reproduce--increasing their fitness for their environment. But to me, the real emphasis of this lab (and AP Bio's) is experimental design. For my middle school/high schoolers this lab provides a whole lab period of design/evaluate/redesign.
Each lab group starts with a petri dish with a piece of paper that I've instructed them to draw a closed shape on with a Paper-mate red pen. I give them three termites and have them observe for a few minutes. Then they must decide on a hypothesis about why the termites behave the way they do and test it. Before they test the hypothesis, they write out the independent and independent variables and the controls they will use so they are only testing one variable at a time. Then students carry out the experiment and observe. After observing for a few minutes, more questions arise and a new or updated hypothesis is formed. The process repeats. Our goal is at least 4 hypotheses tested.
Each time they go through the process, they start to see how their design can be improved. We can talk about how scientists in real life are continually working to improve the design of their experiments and fine tune their hypotheses. The process gets them thinking in a different way than cook book experiments do. For many labs, this process just takes too long, but this one goes fast enough and is simple enough to refine several times in one period.
In AP Biology, this is our animal behavior lab. In this lab, we also discuss taxis and kinesis. We start the same way as the other lab, with the petri dishes, but then they have to develop a hypothesis to test using the choice chambers. They also have to perform a chi-square analysis for each set of results to determine if random chance brought the termites to the chambers that they went to, or if some other factor was in play. We had some great discussion about experimental design with one group who was testing different colors of pen. After their first trial, they realized that maybe the shapes were too far away from each other for the termites to even realized there was another side. Their second round included drawing the shapes closer together. They improved on their experimental design.
The source of the idea for this lab came from the book, Biology Inquiries: Standards-Based Labs, Assessments, and Discussion Lessons by Martin Shields. I developed a sheet that I give my HS Biology kids and then I also outlined requirements for a lab report for my AP Bio kids. I'll include both below.
Last year I went to an AP Biology workshop and the presenter shared several resources with us. One of the resources was The Great Clade Race by David W. Goldsmith. This activity first appeared in The American Biology Teacher, 65(9):679-682. 2003. Here is one link to that article. There are several other resources associated with the Great Clade Race here. Our presenter also shared a set of student questions for the students to use as they walked through the activity. I reworked that sheet to better flow with my class. Here is my adapted version of the student sheets.
Each student lab group receives a huge piece of paper, a set of markers, and a set of racer cards that have been stamped along the pathway they take in the race. Students use the cards to determine what path each racer took to get to the finish line. I encourage each group to plan their race course out on scrap paper first, and then move on to the big paper when they're happy with their map. Initially, students tell me this is impossible, but after some struggle, they all figure it out. All the lab groups draw the race out on their huge sheets of paper and we compare them. At first they exclaim that theirs is different from another, but then they realize the paths are just rotated around a branch point. This leads into the understanding that cladograms can pivot at branch points and still be the same cladogram.
Once they're feeling fairly confident in their cladogram skills, we add another racer--who of course doesn't easily fit within the original paths of the race. Eventually, they figure out that they have to draw in a checkpoint a second time to get him out of the race--an analogous trait!
Then we're ready to move onto classifying organisms, and so they move onto their clade critters. In this part they also make a table comparing the characteristics and use it to help them make their new cladograms. I love how this lab pulls in so many concepts in a step-wise manner.
Over the summer, I saw several pins on Pinterest of teachers using Kahoot! I finally decided to check it out for myself. The school where I teach is a one-to-one iPad school, so each of my students has either an iPad or a cell phone--if their iPad happens to have a dead battery. I created a free account at getkahoot.com and gave it a whirl. I found an AP Biology Kahoot on the first unit we study (there are over 14 million Kahoot!s already uploaded and available to use), and asked my daughter and husband to be my guinea pigs. Even though they didn't know much of the content, they thought it was fun and I decided that I would try it out with my class this year. Students don't need an app or even a sign in. They just go to kahoot.it and enter the game pin that's up on the screen in the classroom.
I can't believe how much my class (12th graders) have loved Kahoot! Until this week, I have only used it for review before a test. Still, the class has enjoyed it so much that they began persuading other teachers to give it a try. Their English teacher was convinced to try it and told me how much they enjoyed it in her class as well. Two other teachers have come on board as well. One of my students is very reserved, so I knew she must really love Kahoot! when she saw we were playing that day and danced a little jig in the classroom.
Before midterms, we did one Kahoot! a day to prepare for the exam. One of my students suggested that we replay so they could reinforce what they were reminded of the first time. I tried to do this as much as we had time for. If I had thought about it, I could have shared a link to the Kahoot! with them so they could do it on their own when we ran out of time in class.
While we were doing these reviews, I saw the ability to download the results to my Google Drive. I loved all of the information it gave me and was also helpful because I had offered incentives for student earning certain scores.
This week I decided to try a Blind Kahoot! Instead of being review, I wrote a Kahoot! to help introduce our new topic. I was even able to add an instructional video to one of the questions. They still loved it, but even more so when we got to the end and decided we would play again in ghost mode--where they are playing to beat their first score (their ghost).
They quickly learned that in ghost mode, the order of the answers are changed. Their was quite an outcry when several students clicked the option location that was correct in the first round once they realized that the options had been scrambled. I loved it since it meant that they had to reread all of the options to make sure they were choosing the answer they really wanted.
I decided that this year, we would bite the bullet and do the AP Biology mathematical modeling lab for populations. Last year I found a YouTube video of a teacher explaining how to set up the spreadsheet to start the lab. He did a nice job of explaining what the formulas that students would need to use meant. For his class, they used Excel, but we generally use Sheets in our class.
I was stoked to see a new resource this December in the College Board AP Biology Community. This resource, done by Brittany Franckowiak was step by step instructions for students to set up a population in Sheets that was in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Then students are set free to figure out formulas to represent populations that are exhibiting heterozygote advantage, fatal recessive, or small population size (genetic drift).
When I'm doing a lab for the first time, I like to do it myself before I ask my students to. It was easy to follow the step by step directions to create the 5 generations of populations in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium.
Then I started thinking about how to represent heterozygote advantage. In the card based Hardy-Weinberg lab we did last year, for heterozygote advantage we tossed a coin when a homozygous individual was born. If the coin was heads, they lived, tails, they died. In the first part of the mathematical model we create, we used an "if" function with the "random" function. I decided that I could add an extra "if" and "random" function to the existing "if" statement that counted homozygous genotypes of zygotes. It would act like a coin toss to decide if the individual would survive or not.
I excitedly shared my newly created formula with my computer programmer husband who regularly manages spreadsheets with a million rows or more. He gave me a further suggestion. My formula is done with the assumption that homozygous individuals have a 50% chance of survival, but I can change rand()>=0.5 to rand()>=0.3 if they have a 70% chance of survival (or a 30% chance of dying). I could adjust that number to match whatever a known survival rate is. I loved this suggestion, although I'm not sure if my students will get that far. I don't plan to share my formula with them, since I want them to figure out a way to model heterozygote advantage themselves.
Fatal recessive and small population size should be a little easier for them to figure out how to model. I may offer some incentives to encourage them to stick with determining how to model the heterozygote advantage.
I only made a few changes to the document by Brittany Franckowiak and it's here. Also, here is the sample Google Sheet I was working on. In my sample, I added an additional tab to show heterozygote advantage, but I will have my students make a copy of their original sheet and then modify it for different scenarios. Keeping it all in one sheet makes A LOT of rows to update every time someone makes a change and can be slow going.
Since I've finished planning out our Molecular Genetics unit, it's time to start working on the Evolution Unit. Here are the guided reading questions for the chapters in this unit.
