It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

So.  I'm teaching a class called "Molecular Biology Methods" this semester.  It's my dream class, one that I designed from scratch.  It's all lab based, no exams, just lots of writing.  Lab reports make up the majority of the grades, and I do expect these lab reports to be awesome.  The college I teach at has a gap in the writing abilities of the students, so this is partially why I designed the course this way.  It's an upper-class course, and one of the goals is for the students to bring together the knowledge they gained in previous biology classes to write their reports and to complete the other assignments.  There are very few lectures, but you know, sometimes you can't avoid a lecture. And yesterday I had to lecture on how to write a (good) lab report.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

I made a powerpoint and everything, complete with abstract, hypothesis, experimental design (survey of what type of jelly people prefer on their PB/J sandwiches) short introduction (including types of jelly and history of peanut butter), results with a table and histogram, discussion, etc.  The point was to use something super easy (even childish and silly) to demonstrate how to write a lab report.  

For the methods section, I gave them some guidelines on how to write methods and the students worked in groups of 3 to write a methods section on making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  They wrote in the correct "voice" for a methods section, and one group even made a figure using highlighters on a post-it.  It was to be brief, but detailed, including the brand of bread, PB, and J as well as how the "materials" for their experiment were stored.  

Then the groups exchanged papers and tried to follow each other's instructions using the bread, peanut butter, grape jelly, and utensils I picked up from Target on my way to class.

Hilariosity ensued, as some groups had forgotten to mention you have to remove the bread from the plastic package, some forgot to say which utensil to use (we had spoons, forks, and knives), some forgot to mention a plate or napkin, and some forgot to mention that you only put the jelly and peanut butter on ONE SIDE of the bread, among other things At then end they got to eat sandwiches, though, so everyone was happy.

They learned a lot about how skipping one (seemingly) inconsequential thing in your lab writeup is enough to ruin a potential experiment.

It was borderline genius. Can you imagine how boring my class would have been yesterday if I had simply lectured?  Even I would have been falling asleep!

This one turned out the best-but I don't know what people have against the crust!

This one ended up having PB and J on the inside as well as the outside...

Turns out that won't stop a college student from eating it.