ADVICE

The following are useful tips to both the teacher and the student.  Technology can be a wonderful tool for learning if used correctly.  

TO THE STUDENT

1.  Browse this site and become familiar with all of the different pages and resources.

2.  Constantly refer to the REFERENCES as they include helpful links and may provide direction to you research.

3.  Keep the ultimate goal of making a connection among probability, genetics and a real life situation.

4.  SAVE all of your computer related documents onto a floppy disk. 

5.  Keep a written record of your ideas and what you have learned.

6.  ASK QUESTIONS.

TO THE TEACHER

1.  Keep the big picture of this unit in mind at all times:  "How can the students grasp the concepts of probability and genetics in order to apply their knowledge in a real life setting?"

2.  SHARE THIS WITH THE STUDENTS!  Why is our fascination so immense about something so trivially small?  You can give a powerful answer to your students via this explanation by Matt Ridley in Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.   As Ridley explains of the vast information that is contained within the nucleus of each cell that contains a Genome (a complete pair of the 23 chromosomes) (Give your students a quick quiz: Which cells have no chromosomes?  Which have exactly half?),

[   The human body contains approximately 100 trillion (million million) cells.... Imagine that the genome is a book.

There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.

Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.

Each story is make up of paragraphs, called EXONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.

Each paragraph is make up of words, called condons.

Each word is written in letters called bases.

There are one billion words in the book, which makes it longer than 5,000 volumes the size of this one (314 pages), or as long as 800 Bibles.  If I read the genome out to you at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take me a century.  If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimetre, my text would be as long as the River Danube.  ] (Genome, p. 6.)