The mathematical modeling of populations utilizing field-collected demographic data is an important component of lab curricula in a variety of undergraduate biology lab courses. During the global pandemic brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2020, we successfully converted an in-person lab on demographic population modeling to a lab that could be run remotely. We used a Google Earth Web Project to simulate a population study of the Northern Spotted Owl. In the simulation, students collected both demographic and mark-recapture data, based on surveying images of Northern Spotted Owls as they navigated four different wildlife transects. After conducting the survey, students used the data to determine population size using the mark-recapture method, derived a life table, calculated the net reproductive rate, and used the information to assess the current management plan for the population studied. Here we outline the lesson and provide materials required to duplicate the lab or to use Google Earth to create a similar simulation centered around a different species in any location around the globe.

Primary Image: Population Ecology with Google Earth. This population ecology lesson utilizes the Google Earth Project to provide students a simulated mark-recapture study. This lesson framework can be applied to any species or location; we chose to focus our lesson on the Northern Spotted Owl.

Evolutionary trees communicate both the diversity and unity of life, a central and important scientific concept, as highlighted by the Vision and Change undergraduate biology education movement. Evolutionary trees and cladograms are diagrams viewed by biologists as Rosetta Stone-like in how well they convey an enormous amount of information with clarity and precision. However, the majority of undergraduates in introductory biology courses find the non-linear diagram confusing and do not immediately understand the tree-thinking central to interpreting the evolutionary tree’s branching structure. Go Extinct! is an original board game featuring land vertebrates (i.e., amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles) and it is designed to engage students in reading this evolutionary tree. Go Extinct! won the Society for the Study of Evolution’s Huxley Award for outstanding outreach achievements in recognition for how the gameplay itself incentivizes students to identify clades and common ancestors on a stylized tree. The game can be completed in about 30 minutes, which allows instructors time to give follow-up activity sheets that help students transfer their new ability to read a stylized tree into the ability to read more traditional-looking trees found in textbooks and the literature. Overall, teaching the game, playing the game, and completing the follow-up transfer activity can be completed in a 50-minute section. Each game can serve up to 6 students, which means 3 games can cover a section of 18 students. Go Extinct! provides a fun and effective learning experience that students will remember and may even request to play again.

Primary Image: Biologists play Go Extinct! Students who play Go Extinct! gain a mastery of reading an evolutionary tree or cladogram. The winning strategy depends on identifying common ancestors of animal cards in your hand. Photo taken by the author.

Role-playing activities in the classroom promote students’ critical thinking, research, and communication skills. We present an activity where students debate a current controversy in conservation. In our case study, students debate the topic of wolf reintroduction in California. Each student is assigned a stakeholder role (e.g., rancher, environmental scientist, hunter, or politician) and a position (either pro or con). First, the whole class participates in a vote on the debate topic so as to register pre-debate sentiment. Then, in the first part of the activity (75 minutes or as homework), students prepare arguments with others representing their stakeholder group by reading the primary and secondary literature and answering guided questions. In the second part of the activity (75 minutes), students participate in a live debate divided into three sections: introductory arguments, questions from the jury, and concluding arguments. The whole class then votes again to decide the winner of the debate, leading to a discussion about which factors do and do not lead to changes in understanding and opinion. The interdisciplinary nature of this activity reinforces student knowledge on ecological networks, keystone species, and natural history, as well as introduces the importance of non-scientific stakeholders in conservation. While this case study focuses on the reintroduction of wolves in California, the activity can be adapted to the reintroduction of controversial species in other regions, or used as a framework for any debatable topic in conservation biology.

Primary Image: The reintroduction of the gray wolf Canis lupus is a controversial topic in conservation biology and environmental policy.

The central dogma of biology is a foundational concept that provides a scaffold to understand how genetic information flows in biological systems. Despite its importance, undergraduate students often poorly understand central dogma processes (DNA replication, transcription, and translation), how information is encoded and used in each of these processes, and the relationships between them. To help students overcome these conceptual difficulties, we designed a clicker-based activity focused on two brothers who have multiple nucleotide differences in their dystrophin gene sequence, resulting in one who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and one who does not. This activity asks students to predict the effects of various types of mutations on DNA replication, transcription, and translation. To determine the effectiveness of this activity, we taught it in ten large-enrollment courses at five different institutions and assessed its effect by evaluating student responses to pre/post short answer questions, clicker questions, and multiple-choice exam questions. Students showed learning gains from the pre to the post on the short answer questions and performed highly on end-of-unit exam questions targeting similar concepts. This activity can be presented at various points during the semester (e.g., when discussing the central dogma, mutations, or disease) and has been used successfully in a variety of courses ranging from non-majors introductory biology to advanced upper level biology.

Creating a hands-on lab that conveys important information while simultaneously allowing for student autonomy can be difficult. This is particularly true for the field of microbiology, in which labs often rely on “recipe-style” instructions and materials that can be difficult to scale up for larger class sizes. For these reasons, microbiology concepts are often left out of introductory biology labs, the ramifications of which have been made apparent during the recent COVID-19 virus pandemic. Fundamental microbiology concepts, e.g., the prevention of communicable diseases, are important to teach in introductory biology classrooms – often a student's only exposure to biology in their academic careers – in order to create a healthier community as a whole. Therefore, this general biology lab introduces an active-learning microbiology lab that teaches students about the microbial world. Students are first introduced to the three major types of symbioses and apply these concepts to microbial organisms on a symbiotic continuum. Next, the students are given examples of mutualistic bacteria, i.e., the human microbiome, through a mini lecture prepared by the instructor. The students are then introduced to examples of parasitic/pathogenic microbes that can interfere with human health and cause relatable diseases (e.g., diarrhea, STDs, and athlete’s foot). Students then apply this information through a short matching game before learning common practices used to prevent the spread of these pathogens, including an active learning exercise and video on how to wash their hands like healthcare professionals. Finally, students are asked to generate their own questions about microbes before working through a handout that guides the students through using the scientific method to address their questions. This exercise thus provides students with the autonomy to ask their own questions about microbes, design their own experiments, prepare growth media their own way, and present their findings in a way that is both scalable for large class sizes and reduces the burden of lab prep common for microbiology labs. 

Primary image: Microbes sampled from the iPhone of a curious individual. Fungal colonies can be seen as fuzzy, white or colorful mounds while bacteria appear as opaque, smooth streaks on the media.

Typical biochemistry labs exploring basic enzyme activity rely on costly, time-consuming protein purification and rarely explore enzyme function in situ. Further, complex purification procedures leave little room for novelty in experimental design. Here we present an inquiry-driven laboratory exercise for biochemistry undergraduates and adaptations for a general education science course. Each student designs a unique experiment to test their hypothesis regarding the nature of avocado browning in a three-hour span. In the presence of oxygen, polyphenol oxidases (PPO) catalyze oxidation of phenolic compounds into quinones, the polymerization of which creates the visible browning of many cut fruits. Avocado fruit, a source of both enzyme and substrate, is a safe, low-cost vehicle for semi-quantitative experimentation. During the incubation, biochemistry students use the Protein Data Bank and primary literature to understand the structure-function relationship of PPO and other molecular components of the avocado. Non-major students discuss how pH, temperature, and substrate availability affect PPO. Visible browning pigments appear on a controllable time scale. Students can photograph results to create a figure to accompany semi-quantitative analysis of experimental results in a single lab period. Since avocados are familiar foods and select test reagents are generally recognized as safe, the optimal protocol investigated in the lab can be further applied to best practices in the kitchen in everyday life, promoting the transfer of knowledge learned in the classroom to practical environments.