Summer School – Day 12 – Human Evolution, and Intro to Ecology

Not a whole lot to post about this day . . . once again (as usual on exam days), I didn’t take any photos. Our morning was taken up with the third exam, including an exam review session. No Pictionary this time, though . . . instead, I put together a game of Jeopardy, using this awesome Powerpoint template.

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Campus-Wide Outreach Event!

Taking a quick break from Summer School posts to share something that happened on campus today: the school hosted about 450 elementary-aged students from the Roberts Family Development Center, a CDF Freedom School. Departments from all across campus set up hands-on activities, the Rohnert Park Fire Department and Police Department came out to say, “Hi,” and it seemed as though a good time was had by all!

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Summer School – Day 10 – Plants and Invertebrates

I know I keep saying this, but THIS IS ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE DAYS OF THE SEMESTER! Today was pretty much fun from start to finish. In the morning, lecture on the diversity of plants, including the various adaptations that allowed plants to make the transition from the ocean onto land. After the lecture, I’d arranged for us to have a tour of the Tropical Greenhouse on campus. The greenhouse is across campus from the science building, so along the way I gave them a little walking tour of some of my favorite plants on campus, including a few Ginkgo trees, a Cycad (my all time fave), several ferns, redwood trees, and the Butterfly Garden. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures along the campus tour, but I have loads of pics from our greenhouse tour! We were welcomed to the greenhouse by Kandis, who provides instructional support for the Biology Department, and she is an exceptionally gracious hostess!

To be honest, for most of my time at SSU, I didn’t know we had a tropical greenhouse. It was only when I was teaching this class last summer that I found out about it, but now I want to bring as many students here as possible. It’s not all that big, but there are so many GORGEOUS plants!

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Summer School – Day 9 – Speciation and Pond Water Lab

Today, it was time to leave microevolution behind, and talk about how new species form. Now that they understand how adaptations and natural selection cause populations to change, it’s an easy step to understanding how this can lead to speciation. To drive that concept home, I put together a speciation activity based on this cool online natural selection simulation: http://sepuplhs.org/high/sgi/teachers/evolution_act11_sim.html. 

The simulation tracks populations of birds on an island, to see how natural selection and mutations can cause phenotypic changes. You start with 3 populations of 300 birds each, and follow them through 1,000,000 years of evolution. Throughout this time, the simulation makes a notification any time a mutation takes place, along with the overall effect – was it positive or negative? Did it help to increase, or decrease the population?

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Summer School – Day 8 – Evidence of Evolution

Today we covered sort of a hodge-podge of things, but there was a common thread – ways in which we can see evidence of evolution, both on long time scales, as well as short ones.

First things first, though – Exam #2. Before the exam, we played a game of Pictionary, using the following prompts:

AlleleAnaphase IICharacter vs TraitDirectional Selection
Disruptive SelectionFunction of tRNAsGene FlowGenetic Drift
Haploid CellHomologous ChromosomesIncomplete DominanceIntegumentary System
Metastatic TumorNervous SystemPhases of MitosisProphase I
Recessive PedigreeReplicationTranscriptionTranslation
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Tag Wrangling in Evernote

I’ve written about Evernote before (Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote), and it’s time for an update. I’d been feeling as though my organizational system wasn’t quite working as efficiently as I want it to – I can’t always find things easily when I want them – so I went looking to see how other people are using the program. After being inspired by some Evernote gurus (particularly Michael Hyatt and Thomas Honeyman), I decided to make a HUGE leap, away from notebooks, and to using tags as my primary tool for organizing my notes. With more than 16,000 notes in my system, it’s somewhat daunting to think about making this change, but I’m going to take the plunge anyway.

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Summer School – Day 7 – Darwin and Natural Selection

Started out the day by picking up where I left off on my Darwin lecture, and then moved on to adaptations, and the principles of natural selection. I frame most of this discussion around the Oldfield Mice experiment, partly because it’s a perfect example of a scientific study that demonstrates the effects of selection on populations, but also because the mice are so cute! I end up using these mice as an example all the way through evolution and speciation, so I have a bunch of slides I’ve animated showing all sorts of things happening to the mice. (Selective forces, like being caught by a hawk when the fur doesn’t match the substrate; and, later, random forces, like severe weather).

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that this is the lecture where I reveal probably the single most important biology fact of all . . . the secret connection between Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. It’s common knowledge that they were born on the exact same day (February 12, 1809), but I’ve uncovered a surprising bit of information that is much less well known . . . the image below should make it obvious what I’m talking about (all photos were found on the internet, so obviously they must be completely legit).

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Summer School – Day 6 – Inheritance

This is always one of the favorite topics of the semester – Mendelian genetics, and inheritance. We cover a bunch of really interesting stuff, including questions like:

  • “Can two brown-haired people have a blond baby?”
  • “Why do I have green eyes and my sister has blue eyes?”
  • “Do twins have the exact same DNA?”
  • “What are the genes that determine how you look?”
  • “Can you choose which traits your child will have?”

We also talk about pedigree analysis, and inherited diseases, and Punnett squares (okay, they don’t usually love Punnett squares haha). But still, loads of cool stuff! My lectures on the topic are pretty well set, but I needed to figure out some lab activities. The one activity I use with my lecture-only course is designed as a homework activity, but it was pretty simple to restructure it into a rotation lab. I also found a few additional things for them to do, and explore the subject of inheritance.

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Summer School – Day 5 – Cell Division

Today? The wonders of cell division! In lecture, I framed mitosis in the context of cancer: in order to understand unregulated cell growth, we need to understand how cells operate the rest of the time. As for meiosis, that’s the gateway to understanding reproduction. (Or maybe reproduction is the gateway to understanding meiosis? Either way, they’re intimately connected). This is a pretty important concept in biology, and while I don’t think they’ll need to be able to remember all the little details on into the future, I did want them to have a really clear understanding of what happens during cell division, so we attacked it in a variety of different ways.
 
First: A draw-along. I interrupted lecture, and asked them all to pull out a piece of paper. Then, using Skitch on my computer, I drew out the phases of mitosis, and had them draw along with me.
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Summer School – Day 4 – Anatomy and Physiology

We started out the day with our first exam. Well, really, we started out with a game of Pictionary before the exam, as a way of reviewing the material. Here are the Pictionary terms we used:

ATP and ADPBacterial
Cell
Carbohydrates
Correlation vs
causation
Experimental
control
Golgi
Apparatus
Independent
variable
Inputs of Cellular
Respiration
Inputs of
Photosynthesis
Mitochondria
Osmosis
Phospholipid
bilayer

Plant Cell
Polarity
Potential vs
kinetic energy
Ribosomes

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember to take pictures of their drawings, but I’ve reconstructed a few of them below. Can you figure out which of the terms up above are represented here? (Answers at the bottom of the post)

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