AP Biology students spend the entire year studying life and its process through lectures and readings. However, with the “Life of a Cell” activity Monday and Tuesday, students engaged in a real life experience to study a real life process.

“In AP Bio we struggle with doing more hands on activities because there’s just so much to learn,” teacher Chris Ham said. “There’s like a balance between the two so they get to learn the heavy content, but at the same time they actually get to walk around this entire school and visually walk through what a DNA would go through as they mature, as they transcribe. So we have notes along the hallway and we have these props to show how the DNA changes over time.”

The activity allowed students to take a break from traditional note taking and approach the material in a creative and enjoyable way.

“I thought it was fun overall,” junior Isabella Knott said. “I thought it was actually pretty entertaining in contrast to actual sit-down in the classroom notes and stare at the PowerPoints.”

Having already covered the material in previous biology classes, the activity refreshed students’ knowledge through an innovative method.

“We got to really experience more of a hands on experience walking around the school, getting more of a group work activity instead of just sitting in a classroom and taking notes,” junior Jared Jones said. “I think it’s a little bit more time consuming, so sometimes if you have a lot of material it’s good to just get it hammered out and just get all that stuff done, but for activities like this, that we learned in freshman bio, it was more of a fun activity review.”

The first participatory activity in the class, Ham looks forward to incorporating more similar activities to maintain students’ interest in biology.

“It is a new idea, the idea was created by Mr. Sabatier, the other AP Bio teacher, because we wanted to do something that is a little bit more engaging and less lecture style notes,” Ham said. “We’re trying to cut back on the lecture format so that we don’t spend as much time lecturing, but we’re trying to do something where we don’t compromise that where the students still get to get all the content but at the same time, it’s less boring and it’s more hands on.”