Charlie's Playhouse - Toys that Teach Evolution

Thanks to my fellow GeekDad writer Jenny for pointing me towards Charlie's Playhouse, a toy company dedicated to games and learning tools about evolution. As Jenny writes:

The 24th of November is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s work, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” To celebrate this important anniversary, Charlie’s Playhouse, maker of evolution-inspired toys, play things and apparel, is inviting us all to ask our kids (age 4 to 10), “What is evolution?” They are hoping this will spark family discussion about evolution.

In the Wall Street Journal today:

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein
Using Mail-Order DNA and Iguana Heaters, Hobbyists Brew New Life Forms; Is It Risky?

(Something to worry about if you're too successful in getting your kids interested in biology!)

See also my post on DIYbio.

Science in the Real World: Microbes in Action

The Science in the Real World: Microbes in Action website is a resource for K-12 teachers. It has classroom activities for all levels, which look easy to do and use readily available materials, as well as tips and techniques for preparing baterial cultures. We're going to try preparing petri dishes using "agar" made from gelatin and beef bullion this week. (So far we haven't gotten any growth on dishes we made last week using a recipe of flavored Jello and Slim Fast...)

The website comes from the University of Missouri in St. Louis.

DIYbio

Not quite sure what these guys are doing, but it does look interesting:

DIYbio is an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.

There's a lot more info at their Wiki. They're based in Cambridge, MA, but have local cells (so to speak) around the world. Check them out!

Planting Science

Planting Science is a resource for teachers which includes two, free, online units you can also use at home, "The Wonder of Seeds" for grades 7-12 and "The Power of Sunlight" for grades 9-12. They not only include experiments, but information on things like Investigating Plants Safely, Thinking and Working Like a Scientist, and Making Meaningful Graphs.

This site was recommended by a homeschooler, but a quick glance at it makes me think it needs some translation from "biology teacher speak" into regular people language. However, it could give you good ideas for experiments, and you can always Google to find a more novice-friendly version or explanation of what's going on.

Biology Online

Here's a site I found today when I needed information on photosynthesis for a book I'm working on:

Biology Online is the number one website for biology content and information on the web. The site aims to educate and promote awareness of all things biology, offering free and easy access to information in the biological sciences.

Created in 2001, the site provides a wealth of information in the diverse field of biology offering a forum for discussion, an editable-dictionary with thousands of terms, links to external resources, tutorials, articles and a biology book catalogue with user reviews.

Planning Biology Labs

In the coming weeks I am hoping to do more regular biology labs in conjunction with some of the topics I would like to cover, including cells, biological processes, and anatomy. In preparation, I'm looking at some of the books I already own and teaching plans and activities online. I'll be adding to the list of Biology Education Links in the sidebar and mentioning sites that look interesting as I come upon them. And of course as we do them we post step-by-step descriptions of labs here as well.

Here are some of the new resources I've found so far:

The Biology Project is an interactive online resource for learning biology developed at The University of Arizona. The Biology Project is fun, richly illustrated, and tested on 1000s of students. It has been designed for biology students at the college level, but is useful for high school students, medical students, physicians, science writers, and all types of interested people.

CELLS alive! represents 30 years of capturing film and computer-enhanced images of living cells and organisms for education and medical research. The site has been available continuously and updated annually since May of 1994 and now hosts over 4 million visitors a year. All text, images, and layout are provided by me, Jim Sullivan.

BioWeb exists to aid teachers of Biology in New Zealand schools. All activities can simply be down loaded and used in the classroom and include general strategies which can be adapted to many topics and links to further resources at the end of each section.

The Structures of Life, an online school publication from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Hands-on Activities for Teaching Biology to High School or Middle School Students: Ingrid Waldron and Jennifer Doherty from the Biology Department at the University of Pennsylvania have developed hands-on, minds-on biology activities for grades 6-12 in collaboration with colleagues at Penn and K-12 teachers.

NYS Living Environment Regents Exam Prep from Oswego City School District

Online Resources to go with Glencoe's text Biology: The Dynamics of Life 2004, including practice tests, links to virtual dissections, etc.

Darwin Week at GeekDad

It's Darwin Week at GeekDad, the Wired.com blog for which I am privileged to be the token mom. When I suggested the theme week I hoped to contribute a few posts about my family's exploration of opposition to teaching evolution. However, the final consensus was to leave out any mention of creationism/intelligent design. Of course, the commenters have brought it into the discussion anyway. Unlike last year's post on the topic, the comments to the post I contributed this year have at least been coherent. But it's still upsetting that people want to "let kids decide what to believe." Here's my reply to that suggestion:

We should teach evolution to our kids because:

1) It is the basis of all modern biology;
2) It provides the best explanation of how living things came to exist in their present form;
3)It fits the observations of thousands of scientists working over hundreds of years (Darwin used earlier discoveries to formulate his theory);
4) It makes predictions which have been verified (for example, that transitional -- "missing link" -- fossils will be found between one species and another);
5) Like the laws of physics and facts about the Earth's place in the Solar System, it is somewhat counterintuitive -- meaning it is not something kids will necessarily figure out on their own from direct observation;
6) After a certain age it is difficult to correct inaccurate ideas about the world. (Go to the article Unlearning Bad Science by John Merrow to read about the study which asked graduating Harvard seniors why it's warmer in summer. Nearly all said it's because the Earth is closer to the sun!)
7) We want our children to have accurate information about how the world works, so that they can make good decisions about how to run it when it's their turn.

PBS Evolution series

We have had great success this school year using documentaries (and some fictional movies) to learn about history. And despite the number of print resources I've found on evolution, I'm having trouble finding a way to go over this material together with the kids. So I did a quick search for a document series and came up with the 8-part DVD set from PBS. I've got it on reserve at the library, so after we watch it I'll put a quickie review on the link at my Amazon store. But from the reviews I've already read, it looks perfect for our purposes.

In the meantime, there's a companion website at PBS with web activities, video clips and more.

Teach Them Science

A new website called Teach Them Science was mentioned in stories about the recent defeat in Texas of anti-evolution statements some school officials wanted to insert into the state's textbooks. This threat is bigger than just Texas, because textbook publishers cater to the Texas market -- which buys in bulk for the entire state. Here is what the National Center for Science Education says about the new website:

As the Texas state board of education prepares to vote on a revised set of state science standards, two organizations — one secular, one religious — have joined forces to produce a new website, Teach Them Science, in order to advocate for a twenty-first-century science education for the students in Texas's public schools. Sponsored by the Center for Inquiry Austin and the Clergy Letter Project, the Teach Them Science website is intended to empower parents, educators, and concerned citizens to rally in support of the new standards, which treat evolution as the central and unifying principle of the biological sciences that it is.

The National Center for Science Education's own site has some interesting information about the why the controversy is important:

• The new standards last for ten years. The SBOE voted on the new standards during their January 2009 meeting, and barring a reverse vote in March, the new standards will apply for ten years.
• Evolution is science, not politics. Anti-evolutionists argue against evolution using rhetoric, but it takes new evidence to change science. They are teaching students that science works like politics. Evolution is one of the most strongly confirmed theories in science.
• God and evolution get along just fine. Many people of faith accept evolution, including both clergy and scientists.
• Science is our children's future. If we teach students that science works in ways that it does not, we risk their future in science. We also risk our country's future in science.
  

About that site:

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit, membership organization providing information and resources for schools, parents and concerned citizens working to keep evolution in public school science education. We educate the press and public about the scientific, educational, and legal aspects of the creation and evolution controversy, and supply needed information and advice to defend good science education at local, state, and national levels. Our 4000 members are scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens with diverse religious affiliations.

Top 10 Amazing Biology Videos

Interesting list compiled by Wired Science blogger Aaron Rowe. Some of the links look funky, but they all work. Enjoy!

Hippocampus- Free Online AP Biology Course

From the HippoCampus Teaching Biology blog:

November 24, is the 149th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, a book that launched a scientific revolution and forever altered our understanding of who we are. In the last century and a half, both the book and its author have become icons, household names that most people recognize but many only know in a superficial and caricatured way. Charles Darwin, morose old man with a big white beard, who took a boat ride one day and got hit in the head with a finch, thus discovering evolution. The theory of evolution, aka survival of the fittest, except it must not be true because it’s still only a theory after all this time.

HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education whose is to provide "high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge." According to their website, HippoCampus content has been developed by "some of the finest colleges and universities in the world" and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses, which makes editorial and engineering investment in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus.

The HippoCampus Biology home page has links to the blog, other interesting-looking biology content -- and a complete, free, online AP Biology course.

Although AP (Advanced Placement) courses are a useful way to earn some college credit while still in high school, I've decided not to pursue them for my kids. In school-school they indicate that the student is willing to work harder on what is billed as a higher level course. But for us as homeschoolers, it just means more hoops to jump through and another test to teach to. I'd rather devote my energies to hands-on activities, a variety of books and resources, and focusing on a few topics of interest to me and the kids.

On the other hand, who knows what we'll want down the road.

My quick impression the AP Bio course is that it consists of a fairly pleasant young voice reading a textbook, accompanied by related graphics. Despite the idea that AP classes are supposed to be for the creme de la creme of high school students, the content and its presentation seems to be at a middle school level (at least the introduction). In other words, it sounds more like learning software you'd see in the earlier grades than a college lecture.

If you try this Hippocampus AP course (or any other) I'd be interested in hearing what you think!

Wayne's Word Online Textbook of Natural History

I'm currently working on a children's activity book about the desert for Nomad Press. My research is turning up a lot of great websites, among them Wayne's Word, an online Textbook of Natural History written by Wayne. P. Armstrong. The website is a supplement to Professor Armstrong's general biology and botany courses at Palomar College in California.

Armstrong is retired, but continues to teach two of his courses -- Plants and People (Botany 115) and General Biology (Biology 101)-- online, with no meetings on campus. He writes that both courses are based on the thousands of pages of lecture notes that were laboriously placed on blackboards and whiteboards for more than thirty years, along with more than 2,300 photo images and illustrations.

That's a lot of material, all available online, for free. While I've only skimmed the site and read a few articles (about desert micro-organisms), it seems to be accessible, well organized and nicely illustrated. Check it out!

Open Courseware Resources

Just got a tip about this post collecting 100+ Incredible Open Courseware Resources for Science Geeks. The courses are college level, of course, but often they include links, lesson plans or experiments that are useful for teaching younger kids at home. Among the biology topics are genetic modification and natural selection.

Free Science Texts from Amsco Publications

Go to the AMSCO School Publications website and you'll see a link for free textbooks available for a short time as downloadable PDF files. The current offering is marine biology, but for some reason the PDFs weren't viewable. However I not only found links that do work, I found other PDF files as well. They may not be available for long, so grab them if you want them. Here they are:

Marine Science: Marine Biology and Oceanography

Marine Science: Marine Biology and Oceanography/Teacher’s Manual with Answers

The Living Environment: Biology/Teacher's Manual

EARTH SCIENCE: The Physical Setting

Contemporary Chemistry THE PHYSICAL SETTING

Contemporary Chemistry THE PHYSICAL SETTING/Teachers Manual

Tree of Life

I just came upon The Tree of Life website which making up a worksheet for the kids to do our Backyard (and Frontyard -- we've got a snake living under the sidewalk, and I saw some slime mold there the other day) Survey.

It looks like a wonderful resource for studying how organisms are related, according to DNA evidence of their evolution. In the Treehouse section in particular are games, webquests, etc. for students created by teachers and as class projects.

Here's the description from the TOL homepage:

The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 9000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms (e.g., echinoderms, tyrannosaurs, phlox flowers, cephalopods, club fungi, or the salamanderfish of Western Australia). ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.

Something to think about when creating a high school biology curriculum

As I decide what I will try to present to my kids this year, I'm coming across advice and lists I've saved in the last few months. Here is something I found on a discussion list for parents of homeschooling high schoolers. The parent looking for teaching suggestions was advised by a biology professor to have the kids develop questions and then search for the answers. He wrote:

And where will the questions come from? Various sources. Here are
thoughts: go to a park; to an aquarium; to a beach; to a natural
history museum (some can be deadly dull, of course); on vacation go to
a desert, a forest, a national park; just go outdoors and look around;
get a bunch of seeds (such as cucumber or sunflower), plant them in
disposable cups (maybe in Perlite) and do things with them (tip them
on their sides, put them across the room from a window, let them grow
in the dark from Day Zero to when they croak, cut off the top of the
plant, whatever) and see what happens and question WHY/HOW it
happened; take advantage of cuts, colds, bruises, allergies, sunburn,
suntan, zits--ANYTHING--to have an excuse to learn what's happening;
ANYTHING that can lead to questions.

He also wrote a random list of questions off the top of his head to
start on if the kids had not developed questions on their own:

Evolution
Why do antibiotics stop working after a number of years?
Look at a map of Galapagos--why do same birds have diff beaks on
diff islands?
How do we know (or are learning) how different things are related?
How do new species evolve?
What IS a species?
How did life colonize the dry land?

Genetics
How can you produce a calico cat? Can you just breed them with
each other?
Can two brown-eyed parents produce a blue-eyed child?
Look at those ants out there! What sex are they?

Digestion
Why is vomitus sour/"burny"?
Why don't our stomach contents digest the stomach lining?
Why does our digestive tract have so many parts?

Plants
What is pollen? What does it do?
Why do plants grow toward the light?
What happens if you tip a plant on its side? Why?
Why don't some seeds germinate right away?
Why do poinsettias bloom around Christmas?
(look at root x.s., figure it out (no refs) and ask questions)
How do some plants manage to live where it's very dry?
Could we teach other plants to live where it's very dry?
(plant seeds--cucumber, sunflower, radish--in cups and just do
things with them; design experiments to understand why interesting
things happened)

Musculoskeletal system
Why are bedridden patients likely to break bones?
Why do astronauts have to exercise while in space and
be careful when they come down to Earth?
Why is a popped Achilles tendon serious? What does it do?
How does a broken bone heal?
Whales breathe air--why can't they breathe while on the beach?
Athletes are forever tearing their ACLs. What IS the ACL,
what does it do? What is the problem if it's torn?
Why are some runners better at distance events and others
better at dashes?
Are all the joints in our body structured the same? How do
they differ? Why are they structurally different?
Why are our knees so darn complicated?

Endocrine system
We keep reading about athletes on steroids... what are
steroids, do normally have them in our bodies, what do they do,
what are steroids used for in medicine, what's the fuss
about use by athletes, are there useful artificial steroids... ?

Cardiac system
What is your doctor learning by listening to your heart?
What does your heart do? How?

Respiratory system
How can whales dive so deep and stay down so long?
What do your lungs do? How?

Excretory system
What do your kidneys do? How?
Why do some fish live only in fresh water and others only in
seawater?

Ecology
Why are there so many more zebras/etc. than lions/etc.?
What caused the Dust Bowl?
Why is the vegetation on one side of a mountain range so
different from that on the other side?
What drives ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream and the
California Current and what effects do they have?
When a pest (such as the gypsy moth) attacks an area, should
we simply try to kill all of them (everywhere) by spraying?
How does a constantly growing population (people, bacteria in
a bottle, coyotes in a city...) affect the rest of the world?
Why do so many flying insects have black/yellow striped
abdomens? What's going on there? What are the consequences?
What are corals? What are coral reefs? What will they be
like by the time I'm a grandparent?

Behavior
Why do male dogs pee on trees?
Why do puppies roll over on their backs when a frightening dog
comes along?
Why do snakes/lizards bask in the sun?
Why don't we have to?
How does a digger wasp learn the location of the hole in
the ground that is its nest?
How does an ant manage to lead her nestmates to a food source?
How does a honey bee direct her nestmates to a food source?
What do fireflies accomplish by their flashing?

Nervous system
Why does our foot move when the doc taps our knee?
How do we respond to some things faster than we are aware of them?

Micro
Why don't antibiotics work on viruses (use penicillin example)?
How do some viruses make us sick?
Are viruses alive? (note: biologists don't agree--it's a
matter of criteria, and useful to discuss)
Why does penicillin kill bacteria without hurting us?
How does (some drug taken by the child) work to make me better?

MolBiol (NA and proteins)
How did they make the green-glowing kitten?
How did "they" discover that genes are DNA?
What is the genetic code?
How did "they" crack the genetic code? (need an FAQ here
probably)
Why do I keep hearing about cracking of more organism's genomes?
What are mutations? How does a mutation (of DNA) cause a
change in the organism (or animal, or human)
What is cancer? How can we treat it?

Immunology
Why can we vaccinate against (smallpox/polio/mumps/etc.)?
Why can't we vaccinate against (malaria/HIV/etc.)?
Why/how are some people allergic to (ragweed/etc.)?

Epidemiology
The "card trick" modeling the London cholera plague [Note: Have to look that one up!]

Development
Why do different cells make different things (pigments, etc.)?
How does a single cell turn into an adult animal/person?
What is cloning?
How can I avoid becoming pregnant?
What is menstruation?

Diversity
Do all plants have flowers?
Do all plants have seeds?
Do all animals have eyes?
Do all snails live on land?
What do ... eat?
What eats ... ?
Are fungi (or molds) good for anything?
Would it be a good idea to kill all the molds on Earth?

She added: "His wife (a biology major) also suggested having the kids read the
health section in the newspaper. He said that trying to cover all the
material typically attempted in an introductory college biology course
is crazy - the end result is that the scientific process (thinking,
reasoning, making connections, drawing conclusions) is lost and that
instead it's just a lot of facts to memorize which the kids promptly
forget anyway."