Although for the last two years I had been starting AP Bio with a lemonade lab (after brief introductions), I decided we needed a change this year. I loved the practice with experimental design students got, but the lab itself didn’t add anything to the content of the class. Through the AP Biology Facebook community, I saw a water lab that helped introduce statistics. They'll perform several trials to determine the number of drops of water, water with soap, or rubbing alcohol that will stay on a penny without spilling over. Not only does this lab give statistics practice, but also fits with the current content--biochemistry. Over the summer, students read the water chapter and this lab allows some review of this material.
I won't include the lab document since it isn’t mine to share, but I did make a google sheet to accompany it. This is the link to the google sheet I made for students to put their data. I put all of the formulas in for them this time, since I wanted to focus on the stats themselves. I also combined their data to get sample sizes large enough for +/- 2SEM to work for the 95% confidence interval. We’ll do one more lab activity where I give the formulas before I task them with an inquiry lab and they have to do the stats on their own.
I do start the class with quick introductions to me and to the class itself. This year the introduction will come through a Kahoot! I also have students fill out a google form to help me get to know them better. Then we jump into our lab. I'm also using a new way to split kids into lab partners. In the past I have let them choose partners, but it doesn't always work well. This time they'll pick a card and figure out their lab group and lab table. The colored cards will each be on a different table. It'll also be a quick check of how their summer learning went.
