When Linda Robinson of the Department of Biology learned this summer that fall courses would be moving online, she and her teaching colleagues got started on prepping course materials that allowed students to bring the lab experience into their own homes.
“What I was hoping was the students would feel, ‘This is so cool that I get to do these things at home,’” Robinson says. “The reality of the pandemic is that students are stressed, but I have heard from some that the labs have been kind of an escape, a chance to get away from the computer and do experiments and even go outside for some of the assignments.”
Biology 101, 102, and 123, offered through the School of Arts and Sciences, provide students hands-on lab experiences and experimental design and analysis. Studying from home presents some challenges—like where to store your dissection samples and making sure your cat doesn’t interfere with your overnight gel run—but the students’ widespread locations actually added unexpected value to one class’s microscopy assignment. Robinson says the students shared water samples from all over, adding to the variety of specimens the class was able to study.
Leah Ingeno, a Post-Baccalaureate Studies student and clinical research coordinator in the Perelman School of Medicine, was able to collect samples for the microscopy lab from the Biopond on Penn’s campus. She used a pocket microscope provided by the course instructors to explore the waters. “I figured there would be a lot of little creatures in there,” she says, but she didn’t see much at first. “Then I used a long pipette to collect water from a more stagnant area and did see something. That was a lot of fun to do.”
Read more about this fall’s at-home biology labs at Penn Today >
