I think that one of the most important things for students to take out of a science class is some degree of scientific literacy. In order to help build this, I have students read scientific papers and get experience analyzing and understanding real data. When I first designed my AP Biology course, I decided that we would read a related paper at least once for each unit. 

This can be challenging for undergraduate students, let alone the high schoolers that I teach, so in order to scaffold the students, I have them complete "Figure Facts" slides. In essence, these are a guided way to go through a paper, which has students break down each figure or table and describe what was tested and what the data shows. Students can add/delete slides (or boxes) as needed in order to cover all of the figures present. I've found that this greatly helps students to learn how to read a paper. 

See this link for the Google Slides file so that you can make a copy of it and have students use it.

Science is all about collecting data. In order to more easily understand what the data is telling us, we often visualize it in the form of graphs. Students will need to develop the skills necessary to read and analyze graphs not only for their science classes but throughout their lives as well. Graphs are encountered throughout people's lives, and being able to understand and interpret what is being shown is essential.

For this activity, I chose a variety of graphs from published data to give students practice reading and analyzing different types of graphs from contexts they might not be familiar with.

One of the most important things for students to learn in any science class is experimental design. This lab centers around students developing their own experimental question, developing a procedure, and then collecting and analyzing their data. It uses "choice chambers" which can be set up so that there are different conditions on each side. You can purchase choice chambers, which typically look like plastic dishes connected to each other, or you can easily make your own. You could even use any sort of small container or box for this lab if you wanted to.

I have a variety of supplies that I tell students they can use (soil, sand, different colored papers, plant growth lights, gravel, water, vinegar, salt, etc.), and if they want to use anything else they need to bring it in themselves. You can also run this by supplying nothing but the chamber and organisms and having students bring the rest. I usually have students get their plans approved by me first, as you'll sometimes get things like students trying to drug or torture their animals.

The standard form of this lab involves using pillbugs, but lately, I've been using dubia roaches since I have them in the classroom as food for Gorgonzola, my class pet. If you are interested in the pillbug version of this lab, see here. If you choose to use the pillbug version, there is a very easily made positive control, as they are crustaceans with gills that are known to prefer moist areas.

Another experimental design activity that I like to do, and one that involves significantly fewer supplies and creates a much smaller mess, is studying origami jumping frogs. This serves as a nice and simple introduction to experimental design.

This lab is more structured for students, as their question is already decided for them - they will be testing how the type of paper used will affect the distance that the frog can jump. I usually supply looseleaf, construction paper, origami paper, and cardstock for this, but you can do more or less than that.

While the question is asked for students, they will still need to determine their hypothesis and their constants, and they will get practice analyzing collected data.

This is a very good lab for discussing threats to the validity of an experiment and potential sources of error, due to factors such as the amount of practice when folding and creating the frogs. Or that they will likely be inconsistent with pushing on the frogs in the same way to make them jump.

Making the frogs will take some groups no time at all, while others will struggle with it. It usually takes longer than I think it will, so I've begun planning to spend time during the next period on it as well.

I like to cook. So, naturally I try to work in food as often as I can when it comes to activities and labs. I think dimensional analysis is a perfect way to incorporate cooking.

By converting between units for measurements, students work with units they may be more familiar with, and they typically will have a pretty good idea of whether or not they're on the right track since they should be familiar with how much would be "too much" of a certain ingredient.

I use hot plates for the cooking, and I personally bought a bunch of small pots for use for my cooking labs that I keep in the classroom. You can use actual baking dishes, or just ones made out of folded tin foil for the final step.

Dimensional analysis is something that, at least in my class, tends to give a lot of students some trouble. Due to that, I try to get them as much practice as I can.

This is a "mastery-building" assignment for it that starts off highly scaffolded and then quickly sends students off on their own.

Students will work through a variety of practice calculations, all asked through the lens of the music sensation, Taylor Swift. It makes it a bit more fun and engaging for some of the students, although you might get some angry students since it calls her out on her carbon emissions.

One of the essential components of ecology is learning about species interactions. In order to learn about this, I like to bring students on a safari. My classroom gets turned into a jungle, with fake plants decorating the walls and desks, the SmartBoard showing a waterfall with associated "jungle sounds", and dozens of little critters scattered throughout the room. Students typically come in rather confused about what is going on.

Their task is to learn as much as they can about the pipe cleaner "newly discovered species" as they can. They travel with their groups, taking notes of what the species look like, where they are found, what they are near, what differences there are, etc. Students are then assigned one of the species and are tasked with uncovering its niche - they need to explain what interactions it has with other species, and how they know that. This is one of the first times that my students will deal with CER format, and it helps establish a foundation for later in the year.

This document describes how I set up the room. You can use whatever number of species you want to, and your room will alter where you may be able to put them, but seeing how I do it may help. This lab takes a good amount of set-up, but I think it's worth it because students get a lot out of it and they usually have a lot of fun with it as well.

This is a project that I use in my AP Biology class, although it could also be used in APES if students do a bit more research into evolutionary concepts.

Students are tasked with designing their own species. They need to thoroughly explain its ecology, as well as its evolutionary history. In needing to be creative and apply the learned concepts to a completely new situation, it requires some higher-level thinking. I prefer it to research on existing animals as it avoids students just copying information they find without processing or understanding it as well.

If you choose to do this project, it's up to you how you want them to display their work, although my personal favorite has been the nature documentaries, with one example of a former student's linked here.

One of my favorite things to do after the AP Exams is to teach a mini-unit on animal behavior and then have students conduct their own miniature ethology studies. It exposes students to a topic typically not covered in the class, gives them experience with observational studies (which are fairly different from the highly manipulated experiments they've done in class up until now), and it involves a fun field trip to the zoo!

I've worked with a professor of animal behavior on how best to introduce this to students, and as a result of our conversations, I split it into three parts. 

Part one has students record an activity log of themselves to develop familiarity with the base concepts. A good way to extend it is to have students create an activity log on a weekday and weekend and then compare them.

Part two has students practicing filling out ethograms, and being introduced to different types, via recorded videos. I personally use, and love, Methods for Animal Behavior Research from the AZA for this purpose. It is very well made and comes with ethograms and videos. If you choose not to use this, I would recommend YouTube videos of animals (for example, this video is great for practice and the same channel has videos explaining how to conduct ethological studies) or zoo livestreams.

Part three, the fun part, is our field trip to the zoo!

Grass lawns are absolutely terrible for biodiversity. As we are learning about biodiversity in my classes, I like to have students actually experience this by having students conduct a mini BioBlitz on our school campus. Click here if you aren't familiar with the concept of a BioBlitz.

In essence, students use iNaturalist's Seek app to identify as many species as they can during an allotted amount of time. We do so on the front lawn of the school and then on the more wild cross-country track in the back of the school.

Unsurprisingly, students find greater biodiversity on the track. We then use this as a discussion point for why that might be and how we could use this information to improve our local biodiversity (and why we should care about doing that).

If you want to use this, you'll need to make a copy of the Google Sheets to make your own class dataset.

Ecological range of tolerance is an extremely important topic in environmental science. This lab also works very well as a highly scaffolded introduction to experimental design, as involves students answering an assigned experimental question, with certain aspects already decided for them.

Mung beans work great for a lab like this as they are cheap, grow very quickly, and are easy to observe and measure to see how their growth was affected. I just bought a bag of the seeds on Amazon and they worked perfectly.

There are tons of different versions of this lab. My version is essentially a mini carnival game. 

I bought a bunch of poster board and cut it into "islands" of two sizes - big (roughly 2' x 3') and small (roughly half the size of the big). I set this up in my room ahead of time, but  you could easily give the islands to students and have them set it up themselves. I use tape to mark the line students throw their "species" from, and have one big and one small island a couple of feet away from it, and then another set of islands roughly double the distance away.

I strongly encourage having students practice throwing their species a couple of times before collecting data, in order to reduce the effects of learning the trick of throwing it on their data.

The inefficiency of meat is extremely important when it comes to land and water use, and altering diets is a cornerstone of methods to live more sustainably.

In recent years, a lot of work has been done on meat substitutes, but a lot of people (not just students!) are hesitant to try them. I've found that many people just don't like the idea of it, but after trying it and finding they like the taste, are far more likely to eat it moving forward. This lab is centered around two things: learning about the environmental benefits of reducing meat consumption, and getting some students over that first-try hurdle.

In part one, students do blindfolded taste tests and try to identify the meat vs meat substitutes. What you use for this will come down to budget, cooking skills, and dietary restrictions in your class. If you have any vegetarian students, you can either have them sit out of the tasting part and only contribute to the discussion portion, or use something like a cheese substitute rather than a meat substitute (if they are vegetarian and not vegan). I avoid only serving the meat and the substitute, and try to make genuine dishes (e.g. jambalaya using Beyond meat sausage).

For part two of the activity, students get some dimensional analysis practice as they calculate the environmental impact of making substitutions chosen by them on a specific recipe. Some substitutes and original ingredients will be easier to find values for than others, but if they can find the information they can use whatever. Most students will do something like swapping beef out for plant-protein meat, but I've had some students do things like using crickets as their substitute.

I offer extra credit for students who actually make their updated recipe and bring it into class for a potluck.

I strongly believe that any environmental science class should involve students becoming more involved with wanting to make a difference in their local community.

In my AP Environmental Science course, I have students identify a place where the school could be more environmentally friendly, develop a solution, and then justify why their solution would help improve things. I am lucky enough to have administrators who support this idea and who listen to proposals from the students and genuinely consider them. The best solution from each class is proposed to the administrators of my building, with some other students also going on to propose their ideas even if it wasn't chosen as the winning one due to the students becoming passionate about it. Some of the ideas have been put into place, which I have found an incredibly rewarding experience for students to be a part of making a difference like that.

This is a somewhat similar activity to the above "Frontier, we have a problem" except it does not focus solely on a local problem and is a little bit less in-depth.

Most students are regularly on social media, and many have seen awareness campaigns on them spreading the word about something. This project is designed to let students have a little fun in making a social media post (I went with TikTok and Instagram as my two options, but you could open it up to any) about an environmental problem.

One of my students' favorite things to do when learning about renewable energy is to actually build something. I have Vernier's KidWind kits and we use them to build wind turbines.

This lab combines experimental design, with students asking a question and testing how a certain variable might affect energy generation, with dimensional analysis, where students need to do a variety of calculations once they have collected data using our energy sensors.

This lab could be modified in a variety of ways, such as including more discussion questions on principals of renewable energy, or turning it into a competition for students to design and create the turbine that generates the most energy.

I've been trying to make an active attempt at having students work with data from our local community ever since learning about place-based education. One of the ways I've done that has been through the EPA's Environmental Justice tool, EJ Screen. This activity will require the use of internet-capable devices, and I've found that computers work far better than cell phones for it.

Students look at the amounts of pollution in Western New York, where we live, and examine how some areas have more than others while using what they know about the area to try and explain why. Students then move on to looking at demographic information, then combining the two. 

This is the first introduction to the concept of environmental justice in my class, and I've found that doing so in a local context first helps to make it seem more real for my students.

One of the most common things that people think of for working with their community and making a difference environmentally is a beach cleanup. Or at least that's the case where I live, with multiple shorelines throughout the area.

I've run beach cleanups with my students every year - both as community-wide ones and smaller ones with only my class. Something I've started doing is having students use the Clean Swell app to help collect data on what it is we are picking up.

Clean Swell inputs data into the world's largest database on marine debris and is used by researchers, conservation groups, and policymakers throughout the world. By having students use this app, not only can they use the data of what they collected for learning more about our own local environment and what might be polluting our waters, but they can also participate in citizen science and help the wider community. All while making a difference and cleaning the beach!

This lab contains two parts - part one is your old-school "recipe-style" lab, while the second part is more inquiry and experimental-design driven.

Students start by observing the effect of carbon dioxide on the pH of water. If you do not have pH or CO2 probes, you can use pH paper and skip the first step of part one. In part two, students design an experiment to answer a question about ocean acidification and its effects on mollusks.

For this lab, I personally just cook a lot with mussels and/or clams in the months leading up to it and save their shells. You could also try asking a restaurant for their discarded shells, buying half-shell mussels and just removing the meat part, or you can ask students to bring in sea shells that they might have in a box at home somewhere.

As students develop their protocols, make sure they are keeping in mind constants and how to ensure they are getting meaningful data. Using different species' shells could change things, as one big example. In addition, I recommend leaving the shells to airdry for a few days - wiping them with paper towels most likely won't be enough to fully dry them.

I believe that it is essential for students to not only read and interact with genuine scientific data but they should also gain experience in public speaking and presenting said data to others. That is where this project comes in: students choose any trait they are interested in, read published articles on the trait, and present to the class on how it could have evolved.

This project works well for teaching students presentation skills, how to read and analyze real scientific data, how evolution works, and what some of our evidence for the process of evolution is.

If students are new to reading scientific articles, I recommend walking through one with them first or having them use Figure Facts Sheets, like I have linked above, to scaffold their reading.

I first made this when I taught Anatomy & Physiology and have carried on using it with my AP Biology class. I think one of the most interesting topics when learning about the human body is learning about when things go wrong.

This activity takes that approach with learning about the parts of the cell. Leigh Syndrome is a genetic disorder resulting from malfunctioning mitochondria. Parts of the cell are taught through this lens. It starts off by walking the students through, and then forces them to apply their knowledge in a similar way, ending with a list of disorders/diseases and their associated symptoms. Students are then required to identify the organelle that is not working properly.

This is a simple introduction to Mendelian Genetics and basic probability for genetics. I developed this version of the lab in the fall of 2020, so it is designed to be completed fully virtually.

Students flip for traits to create their own dragon and then calculate the probability of getting the phenotype that they did.

If you want to do an in-person version, what I have been doing lately is buying various types of fruit and having students build "fruit creatures". They flip for things such as peeled vs unpeeled orange body, whether they have "leaf hair" on their strawberry head, etc. I like to introduce environmental effects with this version by having there be two options for the number of eyes for genotype, based on the temperature outside that day. This introduces students to environmental effects on phenotype and phenotypic plasticity, a concept that we have not yet covered. I have students propose an explanation for what is happening with it as we build towards it in class.

Drosophila melanogaster is the go-to model system for basic genetics experiments. However, it is difficult to do crosses with them in many high schools, as schools tend to not have the equipment, or don't want to deal with fly infestations when teenagers let a lot of the flies escape.

Fortunately, there are online websites that can simulate the crosses, allowing it to be done in a fraction of the time, with no cost, and with no escapees or mess!

I use this lab to have students develop an understanding of inheritance patterns while practicing using chi-square analyses. Students design their own crosses, and based on the results they observe in the progeny, decide on future crosses to run. The ultimate goal is to use chi-square to support their conclusions of which type of inheritance the trait follows.

As I let students choose their own mutations to study, sometimes they examine two complicated ones, and sometimes they examine ones solely inherited via basic Mendelian Inheritance. If you would like to avoid this, you can assign traits. Or you can put traits into distinct groups and have students pick one from each group, for example.

Is it better to stay or switch? The Monty Hall Problem is a famous example of Bayesian Statistics, and also a really fun way to practice data analysis and chi-square.

I like to turn my class into a gameshow, complete with the big fake doors in the front of the room and a microphone. Students participate in a few rounds of playing the door-choosing portion of Let's Make a Deal, with actual prizes (although goofy prizes, like a signed picture of me, a box of Fruit Loops, or my butter chicken recipe) available for those who win. They then break off and use an online simulator of the game to collect more data, prior to analyzing the data to see if it was better to stay or switch. I provide a table for the chi-square calculations to break it up step-by-step as a scaffolding tool, as students tend to struggle with it.

I have a master spreadsheet linked in mine, where I have been collecting the class data since the 19-20 school year, in order to have as accurate of a picture as we can. If you plan on using this, I recommend it!

This is one of my all-time favorite labs. I teach DNA as the "recipe of life" and am constantly using cooking analogies when discussing the central dogma. This lab makes use of that: students are given a DNA sequence, transcribe it, and then use an altered codon chart to translate it into a recipe.

This can be differentiated to be more or less complex, by adding/removing things like splice sites or specific promoter sequences.

Groups of students are given different DNA sequences (I cut the sequences out - but be sure not to include the label at the top). Each sequence will code for a different recipe.

This lab works really well, as most students have some familiarity with Rice Krispy treats. They will know fairly quickly if they have messed up somewhere when they see that their recipe tells them to start by boiling a banana

Extracting DNA is always a fun activity. While this isn't nearly as cool as A Taste of Genetics from MiniOne, this is a modification on the go-to simple strawberry DNA extraction to make it a little more involved.

Students are led through designing a scaffolded experiment, having to choose which experimental question they want to answer. I do this early on in the year and it serves well to get students practice on modifying existing protocols to answer their own questions. It also works well to develop the thinking required to design controlled experiments.

I usually buy a variety of fruits for those who want to test how the type of fruit affects things. Any leftovers are a nice snack to have in the classroom for the rest of the week.

This is a lab examining enzyme function, inhibition, and denaturing. It's pretty fun, because the final step involves students trying to separate the beads while their hands are taped together (which, if you don't want to do, I recommend having them wear oven mitts instead). It usually ends in a lot of laughs, and sometimes students will compete over the last step.

I used to use toothpicks and paperclips for this lab, but I've found popbeads work a lot better, and result in a lot less waste. I have bags set up for each group with the appropriate number of substrates and inhibitors. The inhibitors are two popbeads that have been glued together so that they cannot be separated.

This is another lab focusing on enzyme function and denaturing. While I prefer popbeadase, this lab is a more real-life application, as it involves actual enzymes being denatured.

Have you ever noticed that JELLO warns against using raw pineapple? This lab tests why. Students design their own experiments to test how certain things affect the bromelain. This is a perfect experiment, particularly as it is done early in the year, for students to really work on their understanding of positive vs negative controls and how they are used. I'm personally a big fan of including a lot of investigative labs where students design their own experiments as it helps them to develop understanding of the scientific process.

I provide raw, cooked, and canned pineapple for this lab. As I now have a fridge with a small freezer in my classroom, I will also begin using frozen pineapple as well. 

I'm a huge board game fan. One of my favorite things to do is have board game-potluck nights. A go-to game for a simple, party game that doesn't involve too much strategy is Codenames, which essentially involves trying to get your team to guess specific words out of the words in play. In essence, it's perfect for a vocabulary review game!

You can read the rules of the official Codenames here. I've made custom Codenames cards (linked to the right) for APES words that I sub out for the real cards. I recommend printing them out on cardstock or having them laminated (or both!). You can use index cards, cards from the real game, or even different colored bingo chips for the agent cards - really anything in different colors that can mark the cards will work. 

This website automatically generates key cards for the game.

As our vocabulary words are a bit more complex than your standard Codenames words, I usually give students the option of playing on "easy mode" (can use two-word hints) or "hard mode" (standard rules).

I am currently working on making a custom rulebook for the review version as well as a set of cards for AP Biology.