Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Students experience the practical challenges and creative joys of biological research. In lectures and labs, students think, research, and collaborate like scientists by designing, conducting, and presenting students' own original research projects.

COURSE DETAILS:

Note: the course number is in transition from 272 to 212, but are both the same 3-credit course.

How to register: Fill out and submit this one-page online application form ASAP: https://advance.science.sfu.ca/biology/bisc212/application/.  Applications must be submitted no later than Monday, February 26^th, 2024.  Students who submit their applications early (i.e. before Monday, February 19^th, 2024) will be given a bit of extra preference when ranking students for this course.

 

Applicants will be notified of their enrolment/waitlist status by email prior to March 4th.  Please add BISC 212 in your mySchedule to avoid scheduling conflicts with your other planned courses.  The BISC academic advisor will then officially add students to the course (and the course waitlist) after March 25th, once all students' registration access has been activated. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course will give students opportunities to experience every aspect of being a working scientific researcher.  By the end of the semester, you and your student teams will have:

1.    Gathered original data/observations to contribute to solving 3 real-world problems
2.    Chosen an original research question, and presented and defended a research proposal.
3.    Designed and conducted a series of original experiments to examine possible answers to your research question, and recorded detailed observations in a lab notebook.
4.    Conducted statistical analyses of your results, and used the outcomes to refine subsequent experiments.
5.    Participated in Lab Meetings and peer reviews, to give and receive feedback on each team’s methods, results, and conclusions.
6.    Presented your results to faculty members and graduate students during a public poster session at the end of the semester.     

Unlike most other courses, you will not be given a recipe of steps to go from prescribed question to pre-planned conclusion.  Instead, you will be given the skills and tools to discover your own questions, methods and solutions: this is what a scientist doing meaningful research must do every week, and it is a big part of what makes research so creative and exciting. 

To prepare you for this type of research and learning (and to expose you to the tools and questions of different areas of Biology) your team will spend the first 4 weeks of the semester exploring your own solutions to 3 different “Real-World Problems” (e.g. seeking new sources of antibiotics, new ways to attract and monitor insect populations, and new ways to assess toxicity of environmental contaminants to plants).  During this time, you will learn to think, read, experiment, analyze, collaborate, and write like a scientist.  For the remainder of the semester, you will use some of the living systems and/or tools from the first 4 weeks of the semester to carry out the steps 2-6, listed above.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

**A lab coat and lab safety glasses/goggles are required. You will also need a lined notebook (with permanent, non-spiral binding… preferably with a hard cover) to use as your lab notebook.  The instructor will show you examples during Lecture 1.

**A few lab coats and safety glasses may be available for borrowing, if you don't already have one of your own.

REQUIRED READING: