•Create a lesson plan about Mendelian genetics and
transgene inheritance for students across the Englishspeaking world.
•Get students thinking critically about the science of
inheritance and the ethical implications of genetic
engineering.
• Overall provide a challenging educational experience
for kids.
Methods
 Met three times over the month of April to put
together three main parts of our project:
 Background information for the students, expanded
upon for the teacher with extra explanation and more
examples.
 A worksheet to test students’ understanding as they
work to determine the parents of a pictured cross.
 An answer key, for obvious reasons.

These are the photographed progeny of the cross we chose.
Homozygous red and hemizygous blue parents are not shown.
Templating courtesy of Dr. Liang.
 Short
review of key concepts in Mendelian
genetics
 Introduction to transgenes as a concept and
transgene nomenclature
 Brief mention of genetic engineering and
application of transgenic organisms,
including GloFish (pets)
 All topics expanded upon for the teacher
with so that students can ask for help if they
need it but smarter students are not bogged
down by excessive explanation.
Results (Worksheet)
 The worksheet we created asks a number of questions
designed to get students to apply their knowledge
towards determining the parents of the GloFish cross
pictured earlier.
 Instead of making students figure out the parents from
scratch, we provided three possible pairs and had students
make Punnett Squares for each one and see which one
matched the pictured cross.
Worksheet (cont.)
 We also asked students to come up with arguments for
and against genetic engineering. We offer a suggestion for
the teacher to allow students to access the Internet.
 It is important that people, especially younger people, not
only understand what can be done with science, but also
what should be done.
 Then we also made an answer key, again, for obvious
reasons.
Conclusions
 In summary, we hope we’ve created something good here.
 What did we learn?
 Going back and having to think about middle school = having to
remember middle school = not fun.
 Writing to teach others ≠ writing to demonstrate your own
knowledge to a class or a professor.
 Procrastination in library study rooms = very easy.
Questions?