Unit 1 Reflections: The Game of Science

We kicked off Unit 1 Experimental Design with "The Game of Science."  With this lesson plan, several board games are given with a list of moves, but no rules.  The challenge is for the students' to develop a "theory" (aka the rules) of the game.
I planned to do this in one 90 minute class period, although I truly had no idea how long it would take.  The groups in my standard biology class all got the same game, while I gave each group a different game in my honors biology classes. Once the students developed a "theory" of the rules of the game, their group was to whiteboard their rules, which we then shared in a board meeting.

My standard biology class struggled a bit more than my honors classes with this activity.  One strategy I implemented for struggling groups was to select a member from a confident group and allow the struggling group to ask them for one hint (I read this on the Woodside Biology blog).  Helpful, although some groups still struggled.

While all the groups were eventually able to develop a theory, some had incorrect theories.  This brought about pretty good debate in the board meeting.  I was pleasantly surprised with the participation level in all my classes.  We even stopped the board meeting in a couple classes to "test" the theories by playing the game following different rules.

I then had the students reconvene with their groups and asked them to think about how they developed their theories for the rules of the game.  I also asked them to think about whether or not that process involved the scientific method (yes).  I then asked them to develop a model for what they believed are the steps in the scientific method based on this experience.

Again, we had a board meeting to come up with our consensus model for the scientific method.  There was quite a bit of debate in all classes about how many steps we should have, what steps were "the same" or could be combined (example: should observing and identifying a problem be 1 or 2 steps?), what steps were truly necessary (examples:  is researching a problem always necessary?  should "analyze" be a step or is it part of forming your conclusion?).

Some examples of the different consensus models my classes came up with, which I re-copied on the board for clarity:

The entire process took about 1 1/2 class periods for my honors classes, although it took nearly 2 class periods for my standard class.  I do think that was quite a long time to spend developing a model for something the students already essentially know, however I hope that the time spent familiarizing ALL of us with the modeling process was well spent.

One issue I feel like I was having was that I was rapid-firing questions at the board meetings.  I did notice my questioning did get a little better as the day(s) progressed... but it still needs work... I kept thinking of better questions I should have asked after the fact.