BellVeiws Oct. 15, 2004 : BELLviews Newsletter : Story Index : District News & Events : About BSD : Bellevue School District

Teachers use new ways to teach complex biology concepts

What do cell phone networks have to do with the study of an ecosystem in the Great Salt Lake?

International School biology teacher Claudia Ludwig lays out the foundation for the ecosystem study by illustrating how one component of a system affects another.

H igh school biology has changed. No more formaldehyde-soaked frogs to dissect. No more facts learned in isolation from other facts and all unrelated to current biological research.

Bellevue students are the first to use biology materials designed to bring them "the concepts of 21st century biology and medicine." (see source of this quote below)

The proof of this change can be seen in the introduction to a lab report by Evan O'Brien, International School 1th-grader:

"The purpose of this experiment is to find out under what conditions halobacteria live and why they thrive under the conditions at the Great Salt Lake. We also need to discover why and how the construction of the causeway across the Great Salt Lake entirely disrupted the ecosystem."

Evan's introduction describes a learning goal of the first module -- "Networks in Biology" -- of a sophisticated supplemental biology curriculum being developed by Bellevue's high school biology teachers and a team of scientists from the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB). The course will cover the same topics it has always covered – genetics, evolution, ecology, human biology, and cell function – but will be updated to incorporate the latest thinking by some of the world’s best minds. "Networks in Biology" is one of five modules to be created over the course of the next few years to enhance the current biology program, which is now a ninth-grade requirement (in all but the International School where it is an 11th-grade course) by making it inquiry-based, using equipment that you would find in a real research lab, and starting with a scenario familiar to teens, namely, cell phone communication.

New modules will weave a systems approach into the course, which will incorporate many disciplines including chemistry, information technology, biology, math and physics. The project is led by Dr. Leroy Hood, president of the institute and world-renowned geneticist and molecular biologist, who said, "The science-educational partnership between Bellevue and the Institute for Systems Biology gives us a unique opportunity to transform the teaching of high school biology – by bringing to it the concepts of 21st century biology and medicine."


Students are not the only ones excited by the new module. Bellevue teachers, according to ISB Senior Research Scientist Nitin Baliga, "enthusiastically participated in a five-day institute where they received training by ISB scientists. Given that this was the first time these education products are being implemented in high schools, the teachers often faced unexpected problems and challenges. We are really appreciative of their patience and feedback, which will make future versions of the material more sophisticated and easier to implement." Bellevue teachers who played a lead role in the project are Claudia Ludwig (IS), Sarah Nehring (NHS) and Jeanine Sieler (BHS). Below is a simplified version of what took place during each step of the "Networks in Biology" module:		High school biology teachers learn how to teach the first module during a summer staff development program- here with Director of Curriculum Kathee Terry

Part I:
Using information given to them about classmates to whom they could send and receive cell phone messages, students worked in teams to query each other and, based on their queries, create a class cell phone network. Following this, they used software developed by the Institute for Systems Biology to see their networks on a computer screen. Keeping with the cell phone analogy, questions liked the following were posed: Sprint PCS's cell phone towers are struck down by a meteorite. How will this affect our cell phone network? On a field trip student "X" takes a picture of a cool rock formation and sends it to everyone he/she can. Which students will receive the picture? On the computer screen, students could see instantly what would happen if a particular student with many cell phone connections was knocked out of the network, namely, that some students would no longer be able to receive any calls at all and news could not flow nearly as easily among classmates.

Part II
The next exercise of the module helped students move from the question of what happens to a social network when one part of a system is knocked out, to what happens to an ecological network that experiences an environmental disturbance. Or, as IS student Daniel Moser said, "We're using cell phone networks as a model that can also be used for ecosystems."

Part III
Teachers then introduced students to what their curriculum guide calls the "fascinating world of extremophiles, or unique organisms, using a real-life example of an event that affected the Great Salt Lake ecosystem." The guide goes on to say that in 1952 a causeway was built which splits the lake in half and does not allow water to circulate. Because there is no fresh water circulating and no streams that flow into one arm, the salt concentration varies between the two sides. A prominent organism in one arm of the lake is the halobacterium, which dominates some of the most extreme environments on earth.

Based on what they heard about the Great Salt Lake, students developed hypotheses about the factors that affect halobacteria and designed an experiment to investigate the effect of salt on their growth.

Here's the shaking incubator for growing halobacteria cultures

Students using the spectrophotometer

Part IV
Using new supplies and equipment funded by the Bellevue Schools Foundation, the budding biologists filled tubes with different concentrations of salt and other chemicals that affect the growth of halobacteria, left these in an incubator (photo on left) for 45 hours, tested the absorbance of light (which measures the population of halobacteria), using a spectrophotometer (lower left), and graphed their data on the effect of increasing salinity on halobacteria.

The results? Erik Simkins summed it up saying that he learned that where they built the causeway over the Great Salt Lake and took out natural water, the increasing salinity of the water that was left resulted in an increase in halobacteria.