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.

Electrophoresis and the Relationships and Biodiversity Lab for the Regents Exam

I had just begun our unit on Genetics, Biotechnology, and Decision Making in Honors Biology when school closed and we transitioned to home learning via Zoom. The labs I do for this unit did not transition well to having students complete them at home.

As we got closer to the time that we would have gone over electrophoresis and done the Relationships and Biodiversity Lab (required to be completed for the New York Living Environment Regents Exam) I felt like I needed to put something together so that my students could get an idea of how electrophoresis works and to somehow do the lab. Of course, since then the June Regents exam has been canceled, but I actually like this lab and am glad my students had a chance to go through it.

The first activity that we did was designed to give them a "hands-on" feel for electrophoresis. I lead them through it with this google slides show. After students made their paper DNA sequence and cut them with their restriction enzyme, I asked students to count their base pairs and use the annotate feature in zoom to draw their DNA bands where they belong. Everyone had their initials over one of the wells, so they knew where to draw their bands. I loved how the electrophoresis gel looked when they finished annotating.

The next day we tackled the Relationships and Biodiversity Lab. Students had access to the NY lab in google doc format through Google Classroom and I also shared this Google Slides presentation with them to walk them through each of the 7 tests on the lab. Some of the slides I copied from other teachers' presentations, I found a video on YouTube of a teacher explaining the paper chromatography test, and one day that I was allowed into the building for 15 minutes, I made a video of the enzyme test.

Students asked plenty of questions, but once they were in their breakout rooms, they got to work. I popped into the rooms to check on them and answered a few more questions, mainly about how to mark the DNA bands in the lab. They did a great job with them. Of course, it wasn't as fun as doing it in person, but I think students got a picture of the concepts that the lab hits on.

Simpson's Diversity Index Lab at Home

I was planning to do the Simpson's Diversity Index Lab from Lee Ferguson for the first time this year, since that equation had been added to the new CED for AP Biology. You can find the lab here.

In the time that I had to put together materials for my classes before the school building closed, our guidance counselor helped me get bags of beans together for the capture-recapture lab, and stamp and seal tests to send home while I also printed reading guides and labs for the unit. One thing I forgot to do was to prep bags for the Simpson's Diversity Index lab.

As I was thinking about what I could do since they didn't have any bags of "ecosystems," I thought of my card making hobby and rubber stamp collection. I used this document to guide the numbers of organisms in each ecosystem.  I thought I was so clever to use my stamps to create ecosystems, until I read the document more closely and saw that that was one of the recommendations for making the ecosystems for students to analyze.

I scanned the stamped ecosystems and put the pdf on Google Classroom so students to use them when we did the lab together on Zoom. After we did it I decided that next time we do the lab, I'll have students put together an ecosystem themselves with some items from home that they can practice finding the diversity index of.  Right now I'm just glad we were still able to do the lab remotely and I look forward to doing it again next year. The pdf with all of the ecosystems is here.

Cave Explorers Lab from Home

We were just finishing up Unit 7 in AP Biology when we got word that we were closing. I had a weekend to think about what I would prep for the students, knowing that we were about to start our Ecology Unit. I looked at the labs that I do for Ecology and tried to figure out if we could do any of these from home.

One of the labs that I do during this unit is the Cave Explorers Lab. I've been doing this lab for a couple of years now.  I use a document from Clifford Nafrada for Cave Explorers and incorporated some of the organism rules that Cheryl Hollinger gave for the alien species for the lab she does. I fill the room with pipe cleaner species, close the shades, and put on cave music from YouTube.  I bought a bunch of shower caps and flashlights at the dollar store and give them to my students to cover their shoes (to protect the cave ecosystem) and flashlights to do exploring. They explore the room, recording observations of the species they see, then lab groups are assigned a species to make a claim about that they support with the evidence they collect.

Since my students wouldn't be in the building when I would have done this lab, I needed to figure out another way to do it. I was allowed to go to school after we had closed to students. I set up the classroom with the "species", closed the blinds, put on the cave music and recorded myself going through the room, observing all of the species that I saw.

During our Zoom session, I played the video and students made their observations. I sent them into breakout rooms with an assigned species to make a claim about using the evidence they had collected. They also could rewatch the video. I think it worked great for a remote lab.

One of the drawbacks of the video vs. doing this live is that I found it harder to distinguish between different sizes of the same species. But it allowed us to do the lab, so I'll take it.

The teacher set up document is here, and the document I give to students is here. Here's the link to the YouTube video.