Team Summary

I. The C. Elegans Development/Genetics Teaching Team uses the round worm as a model organism to demonstrate important concepts and principles in genetics and developmental biology. After initial introduction of the nematode, and all of the features that make it amenable for analysis, we demonstrate the inheritance of certain traits through several generations. We coincide our demonstration of simple Mendelian genetics in the worm with a discussion of traits passed along in humans as a recognizable reference.

II. The C. Elegans Development/Genetics Teaching Team is currently designed to teach basic concepts of genetics to students with little or no prior exposure to the topic. Early high school (9th and 10th grade) students would be the best suited audience. However, since many students do not have much exposure to experiments involving live organisms, upper level students may benefit from seeing how a genetic cross is set up using C. Elegans. An adjustment to our current protocol would have to be made to teach this unit to students from the magnet schools.

In the past we have had 8-12 YSP-teachers as part of the teaching team (TT). Since we break our teaching module up into three separate units, we usually have three separate sub-teams, each preparing their material and visiting the school in successive weeks. Therefore, there are usually only 3-4 YSP-teachers present in a classroom during any one visit. Ideally, 20 high school students is a manageable number for this TT to work with.

III. The basic design of our team is centered around analysis of genetic crosses using C. Elegans. Since these organisms take several days to mature and reproduce, we found it easiest to visit the school on three separate occasions one week apart. This allows us to effectively demonstrate the mating results from the previous week, and allows us enough time to teach our entire lesson plan while not monopolizing the teacher's classroom for three consecutive days. The drawback is that each week requires a small amount of review time to bring the students back up to speed.

The equipment required is an overhead projector, microscope, camera, TV monitor, worms, plates with bacteria, and an ethanol burner. We are able to bring everything with us except for the overhead projector and TV monitor, which the school is able to provide.

The basic outline of our visits is as follows:

Session 1:
Discussion of important human organs/systems needed for survival
Introduction of C. Elegans as a model organism
Discuss important worm organs/systems needed for survival
Show examples of human diseases and worm mutations: compare and contrast
Set up worm matings

Session 2:
Discussion of Sickle Cell Disease: origin, symptoms, and inheritance
Introduce Mendelian genetics
Classroom participation in demonstration of allele inheritance
Show results of worm matings and have students help set up next generation

Session 3:
Review results of worm matings: numbers, counting and Punnett square results
Simple explanation of chromosomes, genes, and DNA
DNA code decipherą amino acids form a word (puzzle)
Discussion of mutations and their overall effects of the organism
Summary: Importance of model organisms to study development and genetics

Each classroom period is approximately 50 minutes. We attempt to split our time evenly with each of the above parts of a session. Since we only have one microscope, the number of students which can "explore" the microscope is limited. This is usually the most exciting/interactive part of the visits. However, several of the classroom demonstrations in section 2 elicit a positive response. The one difficulty with this teaching team is providing enough interactive events for the students, rather than lecturing at them. We are exploring new ideas for each session that would allow team members to break up the class and interact with smaller groups of students.

Overall, the worm experiments give the students a clearer understanding of the concept of dominant and recessive treats, as well as a greater appreciation of predicting inheritance. The main point of our visit is to introduce the basic concepts of genetics in a simple manner and show how this can be studied in the laboratory.

IV. One problem in the past has been the lack of coordination between the teacher and the teaching team. It is very important to provide the teachers of the high school classes a detailed description of each lesson plan, as well as provide reading material (brief) for the students to read prior to our visit. This allows the student to be more receptive to our visit and provides the teacher with an outline from which to prepare the students to ask questions during our visit. It would serve both parties interests to visit a classroom around the time genetics is being taught in the classroom. This would allow the TT to serve as an "enhancement" of the teacher's current lesson plan, and would put our discussions in some frame of reference for the students. The most important part of accomplishing a "successful" teaching session is to make the session as interactive as possible.