Students in Pre-AP Biology dug deeper into their genetics unit recently by doing a lab to figure out the different types of blood types and how these variations of blood types are created.

Biology teacher Kristen Newton believes it is important to actually reenact what would happen in real life from what they learn in the classroom to get a better understanding of the topic.

“We’re going to be doing a lab where they have to do blood typing,” Newton said. “Then based on their results from the lab, they’re going to be analyzing genetics based on what we have been learning. They’re to figure out who is this suspect in a crime. Or who is this parent in a scenario. It’s just kind of a good way to take what we’ve been doing on paper and see it applied to a real-world scenario.”

Having just learned about their genetics unit, freshman Iliana Solis thinks it is a beneficial way to see what life would look like if this ever did happen in real life. 

“The good part about being able to do the biology blood lab is that it helps us to understand what it is really like to test blood and be able to recognize Punnett squares and test people’s blood and stuff,” Solis said. “We also had scenarios where there were a wife and a husband. The husband thought that the wife was cheating on him, but we couldn’t assume that he was doing that, so that’s where the testing part comes in. We had to prove that she was cheating on him. I think it was a really fun experiment.”

Freshman Connor Asmus believes that this lab is a great way to recap what they have learned in class and to learn even more through a hands-on experience.

“I learned so much: things like multiple alleles and their traits such as dominance and incomplete dominance,” Asmus said. “The scenarios that we had to do was also pretty neat. Like one of them was like this dude wanted to find out if his kids were actually his biological kids so we had to prove that they were in fact; we couldn’t just guess. It was a great learning experience and I think we should be able to do more things like this.”