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botany lab ideas request

Elizabeth Frieders fried009 at MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU
Mon Dec 11 14:58:29 EST 1995


This is in response to Mike Weber's query. 
 I have dealt with your problem of bored students in our general biol labs. It 
was a  pretty pitiful lab to begin with and the students did not receive any 
lectures on plants. I taught a plants useful course this spring and let me try 
to make sense of my thoughts: 
I think students are rarely able to connect botany facts with the real world 
(the relevance thing) and thus it becomes very boring to them early on. In my 
plants useful course I tried to teach them some botany facts as it related to 
the useful aspects I was teaching. 90% were non-majors and I had excellent 
feedback from students about the topics and the ease of learning and the 
interest level. Example: people need sugar/starch to survive. Plants make sugar 
via photosynthesis (give the very basics of hte process, not really detailed- 
that can come later once you get them interested in why and how it relates to 
them personally). Plants also use this sugar/starch in respiration - do 
comparisons to animal respiration. I also discussed where and why plants store 
starch and how we humans have taken advantage of that - all of our staple foods 
are seeds or root crops (source-sink concepts). It is very easy to bring in 
morphology here - roots, shoots, vascular system, leaves, flowers and seeds....
Another example: metabolism- discuss the various products humans use (resin, 
gum, latex, starch, sugar, alkaloids, vitamins, medicines, etc. and the basics 
of how and why and where they are produced in plants. 
So how can this be incorporated into a lab? These labs don't necessarily have to
be experimental. I brought in a lot of various household products for them to 
look at ( but the students could do this as part of the lab - extra credit or 
something?) We tested ice creams with and without plant gums for taste, 
smoothness and meltability. We made paper out of various plants - relate it to 
fibers in the plant. You could do starch tests on various plant parts or food 
items. We made potpourri sachets with smelly plants from the greenhouse - 
related it to the alkaloids, etc produced and their possible functions in hte 
plant. You could have them read some articles about taxol and the pacific yew  
and discuss some issues - AIDS, research behind drug production, conservation.
Well, I hope this gives you and others? some ideas for botany labs.
Beth Frieders

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Elizabeth M. Frieders                          The great pleasure in life   
Department of Plant Biology                     is doing what people say  
University of Minnesota                              you cannot do.  
220 BioSciCenter, 1445 Gortner Avenue              
St.Paul, MN 55108-1095                            -- Walter Bagehot 
Phone: 612-625-7740                                  
Fax: 612-625-1738                                    
email: fried009 at maroon.tc.umn.edu                   
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