Immune System Trading Cards and Storyboarding Remotely

I've described the immune system trading cards that my honors biology class makes here. We are remote this week, and we were ready to work on our trading cards. Fortunately, part of the activity is digital anyway. The adjustment that was needed was getting the illustrations onto the cards. 

Usually we pass the cards around and each of the students illustrates their word on every other student's cards. That part is impossible when we are all remote. To adjust, I had each student illustrate their word by hand, take a picture and insert it into the document. I also gave them the option to illustrate the word digitally, they just couldn't copy and paste from the internet. The class was split fairly evenly, with half of the students illustrating by hand and the other half used Google Drawings to put their illustration together. 

Some of our cards from this week.

After we finish the cards, when we are in class, I have them storyboard the immune response to an infection on our lab tables with characters of the immune system that I give them and chalk markers. This time, I put the characters in Google Slides and asks the students to story board in Slides. I love the bird's eye view I get of them working in Slides (even though I can't see all of the students when they are in breakout rooms. It was so much fun watching their storyboards coming together in real time. It allowed me to see some misconceptions as well and address them with the class.

Here's a link to the Google Slides students used to make the storyboard.

The Immunology Card Game: Virtual Edition

As our time remote teaching continues, I have to decide what to do about each of the labs we usually do in AP Bio. Since it's also a dual enrollment class, I need to finish the content and our credit issuing college has asked that I come up with substitutes for each of the labs that we usually do.

I love the immunology game lab that we do and decided to convert it to a virtual version. I blogged about the game here.  You'll find all of the game files there too. To make it virtual, I made a google slides presentation that I will give my students editing privileges. Each lab group will have its own set of three slides to work with.  Students are used to this since we regularly put our lab data into a shared google sheet.

Another beauty of using google slides it that even when all of my students are in breakout rooms, I can see what they are all doing in slides in real time. Then I can broadcast messages like, "Make sure to stay on your own slides." I plan to do a lot of question answering at first as well, since even when we do it in class there are many questions. Once they catch on to what they are doing at the beginning they can usually take it from there to the end fairly independently.

In the slide at the top of the blog, there are pictures of all of the cards that they would be laying on their desktops as they progressed through the infection. You can't tell from the picture, but there are actually 30 of each picture stacked on each other. Students can drag one picture at a time onto their virtual desktop as they need to.

Since I don't know how to simulate putting cards in bags to pick out randomly, one person in the lab group will cut up a piece of paper and write the initials of whatever card it's supposed to be and toss it into a bag. When the person picks a card, she can tell her lab partners which card to drag out onto their desktop.

We finish the lab by them storyboarding the process of a primary bacterial or viral infection on their desks with chalk markers and the game cards. There is also a slide with all of these cards so students can do that virtually on the slide.

You can find the Google Slides virtual lab here. The links to all of the other files for this lab can be found on the post that I linked at the beginning of this post.

Immune System Trading Cards

In reading through ideas from different FaceBook communities I am a member of, I saw someone mention making trading cards of the cellular organelles. By the time I read it, my honors biology class was already past the cell unit, but I tucked it away as a potential idea for next year.  Then I was putting together our Disease and Disruption of Homeostasis unit and realized that there was a hefty amount of new vocabulary for this unit, especially centered around the immune system.

I chose 9 key terms from the immune system and made this blank document for the students to work with.  The first page was formatted to be the cards students would actually make. The second page is where they initially typed their definitions. I then copy and pasted those descriptions into the cards on the first page and formatted them to look consistent. The document on Classroom with permission to edit and told the class to only type in the second page. Students also got a reminder that I could look at the document history to see if they were typing where they shouldn't be.

Students were divided into groups and I assigned 2 terms per group (except for 1). They finished the descriptions in the first class and also worked on sketches for their term, I put all of their information into the cards and printed the cards on card stock. The second class was spent drawing pictures of each of the terms. Each group drew all of the pictures for the term they defined.

I went ahead and laminated the finished cards. They were cut out and I used my industrial strength hole puncher to get a hole into them so we could use a book ring to hold them in sets. And there is plenty of room left on the rings for any other trading cards we make this year.

The Immunology Card Game for AP Biology

We do human body systems at the end of AP Biology.  I like to save my favorite for last.  The only drawback is that by this time of year we are starting to lose some steam.  I try to teach this unit almost entirely by activity.  I started searching in early Spring for ideas of what to do with immunology.  I found an article in the American Biology Teacher, "The Immune System Game" from the May 2015 issue. I decided to make my own "characters" for the game just to make copies a little easier.  After a test run playing the game with my husband, I decided that I also needed to rewrite the directions in an easier to follow way. There are so many steps in the process and what you do changes depending on what cell from the body you are looking at. I opened a google drawing and made a flow chart of the directions. It seemed to work well with the class.

The "bad" guys...

We did run out of time before we got to simulate a viral infection. Next year, I'll have half of my groups "play" the bacterial infection and the other half "play" the viral infection. Then we'll have a group discussion about the differences.

The "good" guys...

I also found in the trials that even for the primary infection, the body ended up with a lot of immune cells--so it didn't demonstrate the advantage the pathogens have the first time around (in the primary immune response). We didn't have any trials where the pathogens won over the immune system. I've changed the flow chart to reflect an increased reproductive rate for pathogens and a decrease in the reproductive rate of the macrophages.

Here are the files I made for the game:

• Key to Immune Characters
• Antibodies
• B-cells and Helper T cells
• Cytotoxic T cells
• Phagocytes
• Bacterial Pathogens
• Virus Infected Cells
• Plasma Cells and Cytokines
• Immune Game Flowchart (Bacterial)
• Immune Game Flowchart (Viral)

After the simulation, students diagram the immune response on a white board using the cards from the immune system game. They certainly understood the time difference between the primary and secondary immune responses after this game. Next year, I also want to emphasize humoral vs. cell mediated responses in their diagrams.

Update: I've worked on making this virtual and you can read about it here.