I can see keeping many of these remote lessons in the future for use with kids who miss school or need additional help. Again, these are not ideal ways to teach, but we do the best we can. I also created a remote slides “lecture” to introduce the topic and walk students through the process of setting up the Punnett squares and determining phenotypic ratios. This animated primer features the work of over 100 scientists and researchers. I also think it might be an age thing, because I often see these same students two years later and they relearn genetics and breeze right through, some even asking why it seemed so hard when they were freshman. Discover the concepts and experiments that define the fields of genetics and molecular biology.

This topic is difficult for my freshman even in non-pandemic years and requires lots of practice and whiteboard use for students to get comfortable doing the problems. I do think this year, students will get an abbreviated lesson on Mendelian genetics and Punnett square. I did consider having students use Kami to write on the original worksheet, but I think that is also not a perfect solution, as it can be very hard to read students’ scribbles. It does feel like it takes longer than handwriting them on paper, especially is students are trying to do it on their phone. Students are also practicing writing parental genotypes from descriptions such as heterozygous and homozygous. It is similar to the printout students would normally use, but in the case, I used inserted tables in Google docs to set up the squares where students could type in the genotypes. This version was created for remote learning during the 2020 pandemic. This worksheet was modified from a popular (and long-standing) worksheet where students practice genetics crosses: Simple Genetics Practice Problems.

Genetics a twisted tale worksheet