Infectious Disease Simulation

This activity was great fun and really drove home how rapidly infectious disease can spread throughout a community. I used the small plastic beakers instead of buying Dixie cups and they worked fine. After each round, I had students clean out their cups well and return them to the front demo desk where I refilled them with either water or .1M NaOH (only one cup). We actually had time to run through the lab enough times to where they did 5 interactions on the last round which infected all but about three people in the classroom, which was pretty powerful. Great Lab!

Differential and Selective Media Lab

This lab worked beautifully! We used Staphylococcus epidermidis, E. coli, Serratia marcescens, and Enterobacter aerogenes. All of them responded exactly as expected.