Growing calls in science education reform have emphasized wide-scale engagement of first-year undergraduate students in authentic research experiences; however, large course enrollments, inadequate student experience, limited resources and departmental inertia often create obstacles to reaching this goal. To help overcome these obstacles, the Department of Biology at James Madison University (JMU) has developed a cost-effective, scalable, and transferable semester-long (14-week) course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) designed for large enrollment introductory biology labs. In this series of labs, first-year students use DNA barcoding to engage in authentic research practices drawn from the fields of ecology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. These labs enable students to identify local species of plants, fungi, and invertebrates using student-generated DNA barcode sequences, which are then shared through a public database. Since their implementation at JMU in 2016, students in these labs have created and shared over 1,500 unique DNA barcode sequences and documented over 300 local species of plants, fungi, and invertebrates. These data are being used in an ongoing project comparing the biodiversity of forest edge versus forest interior habitats, but the labs are adaptable to almost any habitat or taxonomic group. In this article, we provide detailed descriptions of the content, logistics, and implementation of this 14-week series of labs. To our knowledge, this is among the largest-enrollment CUREs being offered to first-year undergraduates in the United States, and we hope that it can be useful to other institutions interested in documenting biodiversity and engaging introductory biology students in authentic research.

Educational games are one active and effective way of engaging students with material while also providing additional motivation to tackle challenging concepts. A particularly popular game concept is the escape room, where students need to work in groups to solve a series of puzzles to prevent disaster from occurring in an imaginary universe, all within a specified amount of time. This paper presents a general guide to constructing an escape room for undergraduate classrooms. Unlike many recently published educational escape rooms, this template does not use any laboratory-based components, making it widely applicable to any class and any level, although it will be most easily adapted to classes that do include analytical components. The puzzles in the game escalate from remembering and understanding concepts to applying and evaluating techniques and data. Unlike many other games and puzzles, an escape room does not reveal the final answers until the allocated time is up, which forces students to work through challenging questions and find solutions within their group to advance in the game. The game provides students many instances for formative assessment and encourages helpful discussions surrounding misconceptions and core course content while they escalate through the challenges.