Anyway- Summer is here so I'll be posting recaps of some successful activities I tried:
In the Spring, I teach the first semester of our intro biology course. The course is fairly large (~270 students) and I wanted to continue trying to bring a small class feel. I do a number of things like trying to learn all their names (successful-ish...maybe learned ~150- suggestions welcome!) and doing in-class activities. My go-to active learning activity is think-pair-share, and we did some variation of those almost every class as it's not so hard to implement in a large class. When I taught a smaller intro bio class with only ~25 students, were were also able to do more hands-on activities, for example building hydrocarbons out of toothpicks and gum drops, and I wanted to do a hands-on activity similar for my large class. However scaling up along with practical considerations like passing out materials in a timely manner are always a challenge.
I had read this paper about a protein folding activity for large courses and decided to give it a go: White, B. (2006) A Simple and Effective Protein Folding Activity Suitable for Large Lectures Cell Biology Education 5:264-269.
It sounded great- I am a macromolecular x-ray crystallographer so I am constantly trying to get my students to think about macromolecules in 3-D and think about structure-function relationships. And seemed simple enough: each student gets a 4-ft 18-guage copper wire, and instructions on forming different shapes in order to create a polypeptide, then they are instructed asked to fold it, simulating a protein folding.
In the paper, the author (Brian White) has the instruction handout on his website (helpful) and a footnote about why you need this specific type of wire (very helpful) as well as where he purchased this wire pre-cut (even more helpful!). However once I set out looking to purchase the wire, I realized things had changed since 2006 when the paper was originally published. When I called the company mentioned in the footnote for a cost estimate, instead of $0.30/wire they quoted me at $1.12/wire for a total of $ 313.60 for 280 wires! Almost 4x the price in 2006...well that's some crazy inflation for you. I wasn't about to spend >$300 on one activity- I don't think my department would think that was an efficient way to spend funds- so I looked around on Lowes' and Home Depot's websites to see if I could find it cheaper pre-cut. I ended up calling Lowe's and talking to a salesperson in electrical for a long time who- after I explained my crazy request- helped me figure out this solution:
- They didn't have pre-cut wire there, but I could come in and they would help me cut them.
- Insulated 18-guage wire was available in multiple conductor form- for example if you bough 18/8 insulated copper wire this meant that there was actually 8 separately insulated copper wires inside like this:
And it was those inside wires that you needed for the activity! - To get 280 4-ft wires from 18/8 wire I just needed 140 ft cut into 4 ft pieces. He showed me how to quickly cut open the outside insulation, then untwist the inside wires.
So I went in, met up wit the helpful Lowe's guy from the phone call and helped me pick the most economical option for getting the amount of wires I needed. Once we decided we started cutting.
In all it took about ~40 mins get to Lowes, get the wire, cut it into 4-ft pieces and get out. And it cost $102 (with tax)! Then I went home and used a box cutter to take off the outer insulation, to get out the inner wires. That took ~1 hr. But then I had them all in a giant box that I took to class!
In class I had a slide up as students walked into class telling them to take one wire from the box. It worked and everyone had one by the time class started no rushing or crowding. Then we successfully used them multiple times during class as we talked about protein structure, folding and denaturation! At the end I told students to put them back in the box. Here's a sampling of some I got back in their twisted forms:
(I ended up with only 130 back though so I think many students decided they wanted a souvenir...)
They are now unwound (with the help of my TAs) and ready to use at least one more time next Spring!
In all it took about ~40 mins get to Lowes, get the wire, cut it into 4-ft pieces and get out. And it cost $102 (with tax)! Then I went home and used a box cutter to take off the outer insulation, to get out the inner wires. That took ~1 hr. But then I had them all in a giant box that I took to class!
In class I had a slide up as students walked into class telling them to take one wire from the box. It worked and everyone had one by the time class started no rushing or crowding. Then we successfully used them multiple times during class as we talked about protein structure, folding and denaturation! At the end I told students to put them back in the box. Here's a sampling of some I got back in their twisted forms:
(I ended up with only 130 back though so I think many students decided they wanted a souvenir...)
They are now unwound (with the help of my TAs) and ready to use at least one more time next Spring!
