Yesterday's Presentations

By Johnica Morrow

Unfortunately, this post will be a bit on the bias side. I don't have any photos of the presentations given by ornithology students yesterday morning to share and I was so caught up in taking care of things for Life 121 that I missed seeing the presentations for this class as well. If anyone has information to share regarding this, we'd love to have it!

However, I did see the presentations given by Life 121 students during yesterday's rainy afternoon. The students were assigned to one of two types of equipment: a dissolved oxygen probe or EKG electrodes. The first day of class we taught the students how to collect crayfish, which was to be their model organism for their group projects. Students were then assigned to do a literature review on crayfish and to design their own experiment testing the effects of ______ on either respiration rates or heart rates of these crayfish. 

This year's students came up with seven wonderful experiments looking at everything from temperature, to salinity, to various wavelengths of light. All of them worked hard to eliminate confounding variables, troubleshoot their equipment, obtain good data, and run statistical analyses to determine the significance of their results. Their presentations were all excellent! Each group delivered their presentations with great presence and justified their conclusions as well as discussing future modifications and sources of error. It's not often that you get a group of student presentations that all qualify as being dubbed "excellent". Seriously, we all know that there's usually one group who didn't do so well...but that wasn't the case with this group. Literally ALL of the presentations were excellent. The members of this class did amazing jobs conducting their research! Bravo guys!

Below are photos of student groups with the title slides of their presentations. Well-done, students! Thanks for all of your hard work this session! So long, and thanks for all the (cray)fish!