Remote Antibiotic Resistance Game Lab

In my Honors Biology class, when we are studying disruptions of homeostasis we do an antibiotic resistance game lab from New Vision's Living Environment curriculum. It's a fairly simple lab...just requiring colored disks and a die.  It gives students a very visual way to see how inconsistent taking of antibiotics can affect the bacteria in their bodies. 

This coming week, we're remote to mitigate any COVID spread after Christmas break, so I needed to convert the antibiotics lab to a remote version. Google Slides are one of my favorite tools when we're remote since I can see what all of my students are doing, even when they are in breakout rooms.  I made slides for each breakout room with plenty of virtual disks. On the slide itself is the number of disks lab groups need to begin with. There are piles of spares on the side to use as needed.  

Students will put their data into a shared Google Sheet and graph the data as well.  I purposely left one of the tables filled in and highlighted to remind me to review with students that they need to add more bacteria after each day.

I have also adjusted the lab document from New Visions to fit my class. I'll link the lab, the Slides and Sheet below.

Student Lab Document

Slides with Disks

Sheets for Data and Graphs

Resin Cells: Adding the “A” in STEAM

One of the benefits of being a part of so many FaceBook teacher groups is the ideas that I see as teachers post. One of the pictures I saw last year was of cell models made with resin. They looked awesome. 

For the last two years in my Honors Biology class, we've done organelle speed dating to introduce all of the organelles. The second year, I had a very quiet class and they just didn't get into it like the class the year before.  I felt like trying something new and I enjoy crafty activities, so decided to give resin a try. 

In my research into resin, I saw lots of examples of flowers in resin. For my first trail with resin, I had pressed several of my hydrangea petals and some small tips of ferns growing on the side of my garage. I loved the results. Then I tried making a cell. I made the organelles with my kids' oven bake clay and tried to just drop them all into the resin. That was a mistake. I watched all of the organelles sink and cluster at the bottom of the mold. I tried to move them around, but they kept sinking. I thought I'd wait for it to set a little and then move the organelles around. By the time I moved them, the resin was too set and I pretty much made a mess. 

When we did these in class, I gave my students a list of organelles to make (with the clay from home...we have lots!) and as students were crafting them, I kept asking them questions about the functions of the organelles they were making. We talked about the structure of the organelles and how it fit with their function.  I also had to continually remind them to make their organelles smaller...or they would never fit in the mold. 

We baked the clay while we were together in class, but we ran out of time to pour the resin together. I worked on it while I had a study hall in my classroom, which was handy because one of the students in my study hall volunteered to do the resin stirring for me. I tried to just fill the molds about one third full, but it was closer to half.  I put a few of the students' organelles in, which still sunk to the bottom. I really need to set a timer, pour even less resin in add a couple of organelles, then more resin and more organelles. They still turned out better than my first sample though.

One student chose to do a plant cell. 

I certainly think it's worth a try again for next year.

This whole activity was done with just verbal directions to the students, but I did put together a simple list of what organelles I wanted the students to make.

Seeds from Space

Two years ago, I heard about the Tomatosphere project and applied for my classes to participate. The First the Seed Foundation sent us two packs of seeds, each marked with a different letter. One of the packs of tomato seeds has spent 6 weeks on the International Space Station and the other pack has never left Earth. We don't know which is which until we submit our germination results. 

My classes plant the seeds during the first unit of the year. We're talking about distinguishing living vs. non-living. We start the class with a Do Now from Uncovering Student Ideas in Life Science, Volume 1: 25 New Formative Assessment Probes by Page D. Keeley. The assessment asks students to explain their thinking about whether a packet of tomato seeds is living or not. After some discussion, we work on planting the seeds. I post these directions as they work on planting the seeds. 

This is a great lab to do at the start of the year, as it allows us to talk about control groups (seeds that didn't leave earth) and blind trials to prevent bias or unequal treatment between the two groups. We also work on hypothesis development as I have them decide which seeds they think will germinate best and why. This allows us to emphasize that an experiment is not a failure if the hypothesis is not supported. At the conclusion we begin to introduce the idea of statistical significance as well. 

The first year I did this with my Honors Biology class, they were so invested in these seeds that when I revealed which seeds had been in space, they actually cheered. That first year, I also had my AP Biology class work with the seeds, but the focus was not just on being in space or not, but also on other factors that may affect germination rates. We germinated the seeds on paper towels in petri dishes. Looking back now, I find planting them in cups of dirt more satisfying. 

Last year our germination rates were much lower than the year before. I'm not sure why. It'll be interesting to see the germination rates this fall. I'm hoping that I'll have my students in person long enough to get them planted, then if we have to go virtual, I can just have them bring their cups of planted seeds home and continue the observation from home. 

March Mammal Madness

Through different science teacher groups in Facebook, I was introduced to March Mammal Madness. Last year was the first time that I participated with my Honors Biology class. In preparation I used painters tape on the wall outside my classroom to mark out the bracket. Then I put together a Google Slides document formatted the way I wanted it to be for students to fill in information about each of the competitors to put on the wall bracket. We split the animals evenly among all of the students and they worked on filling out the information for their assigned animals. Students also used the Slides presentation to make more informed decisions as they were filling out their own brackets. We allowed any student in the school who wanted to compete to fill out a bracket and follow along. As the competitions happened, I moved the winners forward on the brackets so everyone could see the progress. 

Student-made information sheets for two of the 2020 competitors.

Students finished filling out their brackets before the actual competitions began and were ready to go once the battles ensued. The day after each battle happened on twitter, we would watch the rodent recap done by Rodent Roudtable on YouTube in class. Even my high schoolers enjoyed the cheesy recaps of the competitions.  At the end, I gave the student with the highest score on their bracket a little trophy that I had bought off of Amazon.

Sample information sheets from 2019

This year, we went to online learning shortly after the competitions began. Students appreciated that even if everything else was cancelled, at least March Mammal Madness was still happening and we could still watch the recaps together as a class.

If you'd like to participate in MMM, Arizona State University's site here is the place to get started. Here is the link to the Google Slide that I put together for students to use to put the animal information in.