Surfing with small chairs

Great workshop! The chairs in an elementary school are a little low for most adults, but we coped. Dawn Martell, Steve Roderick and Charlie Hayes helped out. It's terrific having veteran GenScope teachers contributing their classroom experiences with the program into the mix.

There was a pair of women from a regional high school in northern Massachusetts, one a biology teacher, the other a special education teacher who used to be a librarian (non-scientist). They were so good natured -- They got lost every day coming in, but they did manage to see a lot of Boston! They wrote a super activity called Dragon Genes to use in their classroom (here's a screenshot).

Many teachers like to personalize the problems they present to their classes. Two of the teachers did just this by using the GenScope pedigree view to bring a little real life to their students in an activity called The Paternity Case.

Although we didn't make a big deal of using the internet, teachers in each of the workshops did try to include a network component in their activities. After searching and downloading a whole lot of stuff, they still found it hard to include all that information in a focused activity ... maybe next year, after more experience.