Using the Rock Anemone, Aiptasia, and Other Selected Cnidarians to View Cnidocytes
Aiptasia and some other easily obtained anemones are used to obtain cnidocytes. One specimen often contains enough tentacles, each containing enough cnidocytes for each pair of students in a sm...

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WINK IS FREE SOFTWARE WHICH ALLOWS EASY CREATION OF ANIMATED COMPUTER TUTORIALS
A new, free (!) piece of software from DeBugMode called Wink allows for rapid and easy construction of Flash tutorials demonstrating how to use pretty much any computer application. There is a Windows...

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Using Student Generated Species Descriptions and Relationships to Test and Refine Understanding of Community Structure
Students in an introductory biology course used pictures of imaginary creatures to construct species descriptions, and then use these imaginary species to build a viable community. Instructors may imp...

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Transpiration: An Inquiry-Based Adaptation of a Traditional Cookbook Lab
Here I present an inquiry-based adaptation of a traditional lab to plant teach transpiration, the process that supplies leaf cells with water and dissolved minerals, that cools leaves, and is an impor...

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Environmental Microbial Ecology
In this exercise, students develop and test a hypothesis about microbial ecology. The hypothesis that students choose must be testable with the “EcoPlate,” a multiwell test plate that allows rapid det...

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A Web-Based Study of Darwin’s Finches
This is a Web-based laboratory exercise based on the research of Peter and Rosemary Grant with the finches on Daphne Major in the Galápagos Islands. A portion of the Grants’ database forms a computer ...

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Defining the Patuxent River Watershed
The lab is designed to be engaging, using a place students know to introduce them to a concept, and then letting them take the concept and apply it to the watershed I want them to discover. We define ...

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The Antibiotic Resistance Phenomenon: Use of Minimal Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) Determination for Inquiry Based Experimentation
The antibiotic resistance phenomenon in bacteria is reported regularly in the popular press and is a well recognized problem. This mini-workshop presents a multi-week module that provides a hands-on o...

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A Three-Part Laboratory Exercise Using Flightless Fruit Flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to Study Modes of Inheritance
This is an inquiry-based investigation of genetic modes of inheritance using flightless Drosophila as the experimental organism. We present the three-part laboratory writeup, suitable for use a...

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Building Retentive Understanding of Biology By Using a "Hybrid" Format With an Interactive Website and Active-Learning Exercises
Introductory Biology at North Carolina State University is a freshman course taught in large lecture halls using a standard, lecture-based format. We are experimenting with a hybrid course that utiliz...

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