The Brains and Bones Project

As a postgraduate teaching assistant at Durham University’s Anthropology Department, part of my job was to plan and deliver plenary sessions for our Human Evolution and Diversity Module.

This often meant balancing my own creativity and the class dynamic with academically-backed activities. While researching hands-on options for demonstrating allele frequency within populations, I came across a brilliant game developed by Lee, T.W., Grogan, K.E. & Liepkalns, J.S.

By using different coloured sticky-notes to represent heritable characteristics, students can tangibly observe changes to the ‘population’ of sticky-notes within subsequent generations.

My supervising professor at the time was particularly enthusiastic. So, when I recommended he become a bird of prey that could see purple sticky-notes better than yellow ones, he jumped into action, stealing students’ purple sticky-notes with gusto. Next, I flipped the lights on and off in quick succession, announcing that an earthquake had killed half the sticky-it note population. We then removed half of the sticky-notes from all the student groups. By altering the sticky-note population in these ways, students could see in real time these heritable characteristics ebb and flow in the population.

I’ve included the full article below, where they lay out all of the instructions and guidelines for bringing this activity to your classrooms.

Enjoy!

Lee, T.W., Grogan, K.E. & Liepkalns, J.S. Making evolution stick: using sticky notes to teach the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Evo Edu Outreach 10, 11 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-017-0074-2

Open Access This article (Making evolution stick: using sticky notes to teach the mechanisms of evolutionary change) is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.