classroom activities

One time I was watching a football game on TV and they had a short quiz, called "You make the call" or something like that, and you had to watch a play and pretend to be a referee. A short video clip showed football players falling over each other. Then you were three possible calls that a refereee might make and asked to chose which was correct. After the commercial, the announcer would tell you which choice was right and explain why it was correct. I suppose this was a trick to make us watch the commercials, but I thought the game was kind of fun. My SciBling "Mike the Mad" had a great ... Read more

Amateur astronomers unite! The pros want your help! I learned about this from the ... Read more

I've had some requests for some more molecular puzzles since the last one that I posted (see A DNA puzzle ). One person liked it so much he even blogged about it. So, here's one for you to chew on over the weekend. This puzzle is a variation of an activity in Exploring DNA Structure, a CD/lab book that I made (with funding from the NSF) ... Read more

BLAST is a collection of programs that are used to compare sequences (DNA, RNA, or protein) to larger collections of sequences that are stored in databases. I've used BLAST as a teaching tool for many years, partly because it's become a standard tool for biological work and partly because it's very good at illustrating evolutionary relationships on a molecular level. A few months ago, the NCBI changed the web interface for doing BLAST searches at their site. I ... Read more

By now, many of you have probably seen the the new BLAST web interface at the NCBI. There are many good things that I can say about it, but there are a few others that caught me by surprise during my last couple of classes.

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Because of these changes, and because I'm giving a workshop for teachers on BLAST at the Fralin Biotechnology Conference in Blacksburg, VA, next week, it seemed like a good time to update our animated ... Read more

An introduction to our Alaskan NSF Chautauqua course and a pre-course assignment. I don't know how well this will work, but I thought it might be interesting this year to experiment with blogging about our course and sharing some of our experiences with the rest of the world. Here's your chance readers, if you'd like to do some of the assignments, you are very welcome to follow along and give it a try.

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I'm not likely to get all the assignments or course info posted on-line, but since we have some constraints with photocopying, we also ... Read more

Do you want to learn how to use some cool biotechnology and bioinformatics methods in your college or high school class? If you're on the East coast, the best place to go is the Fralin Biotechnology Conference at Virignia Tech, July 18-21st. (Yes, it's the same Virgina Tech, and that's why I waited to post this announcement). There's something for everyone at this conference. For beginners, there's a pre-conference Biotech Boot camp where you can learn to run gels and clone genes. For instructors with more ... Read more

Yes, yes, I know Darwin Day was Februrary 12th. Nevertheless, the Alliance for Science is sponsoring an essay contest in Darwin's honor and, if you're a high school student you can still celebrate by writing an essay.

And if you're a high school teacher, and your student wins, you win $$ for buying lab supplies. 

Okay, I suppose it's only us geeky bloggers who consider writing an essay to be a kind of celebration.

If the sheer joy of celebrating Darwin Day by writing an essay, doesn't pique your interest, there are prizes ... Read more

The American Society for Human Genetics is sponsoring the second annual DNA Day Essay contest. If you are a high school teacher here's your chance to combine an interesting assignment along with a contest. This year's essay questions are:

• If you could be a human genetics researcher, what would you study and why?
• In what ways will knowledge of genetics and genomics make changes to health and health care in the US possible?

The rules are here at GenEdNet.org I also have an animated tutorial ... Read more

The bioinformatics classes that I teach use web services and web sites as much as possible, but I still find that it's helpful to have programs on our classroom computers. Here is a list of my favorite desktop programs for those of you who might want to add some bioinformatics activities to your biology courses. Why not use the Web? Before going on, I should probably explain, why we use desktop programs, we have so many things available on the web. We do use the web whenever we can. Web services are nice because you can shift the computation burden to someone ... Read more