Amazing Adaptations is an in-class group activity that challenges students to think about how animals evolved their diverse adaptations via natural selection.
Students will work as teams and use principles of Design Thinking to help design and construct a model of a bird beak to best take advantage of the food available in a simulated environment.
Students will study conditions favorable to growing Chlamydomonas, a genus of algae cultured at the Pringle Lab at Stanford University, to determine influential factors related to growth, life cycle, and reproductive rates.
The goal of this ETP is to teach students two of the basic but integral biotechnological techniques, micropipetting and gel electrophoresis. Every single experiment done at The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) uses these two techniques.
This ETP is an expansion of "Predicting Forest Health: Sudden Oak Death in Coast Live Oak Trees" created by the Ignited Fellow, Angelica Corral in 2017. Sudden oak death (SOD) is a disease infecting various oak species on the West Coast.