Reflections on Second Semester, Part 2

This is the second of a few posts looking back at the semester that just ended. The posts are split up by class or activity. This post focuses on my other two classes, Principles of Modern Biology and Real World Measurements (RWM).


Biology
Biology is a requirement for everyone. It's possible for someone to take a higher level bio class (like Microbiology or Immunology) to replace Principles of Modern Bio, but that's rare.

Bio was my least challenging class this semester. The material covered was very similar to what I'd seen in either AP Bio or Biochemistry in high school. I did like that we talked about recently published research and that we did more discussion than just straight lecture. That made the material feel much less like I was going over the same thing I'd already seen in at least two other classes. Most weeks, the work outside of class was just reading and writing a couple of questions based on the reading.

The more interesting parts of the class were the labs and projects. We did three labs, each of which took several weeks. The labs were very biochem or microbio-ish. We did a bacteria transformation lab, a lab in which we looked for bacteria that could degrade glycerol, and a lab in which we determined our genotype for genes controlling some of our bitter taste receptors. In high school being in bio or chem lab tended to make me a little nervous, and I think comfort in the lab is what I gained most in this class.

There were a couple of different projects. The most important was the teachable unit project. We all had to present on biology topics that interested us and then either have discussion questions or an activity for the class. Some of the teachable units were really cool, and the teachable units were an opportunity to learn about something very particular in detail instead of just getting a broad picture. I did my teachable unit on whole genome sequencing, and I got to talk about a little bit of math, which I enjoyed. After presenting, we got feedback on our teachable units. It was interesting to see what I could have done better, though that information would have been more useful had I been able to put it to use in the class by doing another presentation of some sort. In the other major project, we each had to write and record two podcasts on biology topics. We didn't really spend enough time on this. We were supposed to write the scripts and then peer review them, but that was always the lowest priority on our list of things to do in a class, so podcasts were pushed to the very end of the course.

The biology requirement seems to be one of the more problematic ones. The biology class that I took was the more experimental of the two sections. We used an online textbook that is updated with new research as opposed to a print one, the teachable units were an important part of the class and the quizzes, and we did more discussion than lecture. While all of that helps the material seem more fresh, there's only so much projects and discussion can do to make a class interesting if the student has learned the material well before. It's also the least popular requirement. The people who like bio don't usually learn much, and the people who don't like bio just aren't interested.

RWM
I've had a successful team project at Olin!

Yes, it's a kite. (6 feet horizontal, 4 ft the other direction with 4 ft tails) Attached to the kite is a 9V battery and a circuit board with a circuit to measure wind speed. We flew the kite with electrical wire. Down on the ground was another circuit board with a circuit that took the signal from the kite, filtered it, and then gave us the output voltage. At the bottom of the flying line there's a force meter to measure tension on the line.

The first half of RWM was formatted exactly like ModCon. It was centered around labs in which we used lots of different sensors. For example, we built an EKG, a circuit that could tell how far it was from a wall by sending and receiving sound signals, a strain gauge circuit to study beam bending, and a pulse oximeter. In lecture, we talked about op amps (in more detail than we had in ModCon), instrumentation amps, some more complicated filters, Bode plots, and Fourier series.

The second half of the class was team projects. I was on a team with four other people, and we chose to measure wind speed on a kite. The project was pretty bumpy. (Did you know it's really hard to solder tungsten?) However, we ended up with a working project and a correlation between wind speed and the tension on the kite line!  I learned a lot about risk analysis (things to do when you start a project...oops), and it was exciting to see that a project that started badly could end well. One of the best parts of the project for me, though, was learning to use the wind tunnel. The circuit gave us a voltage that corresponded with wind speed, but we needed to know what that wind speed was, so we calibrated in Olin's wind tunnel. RWM isn't one of my favorite classes I've had at Olin so far, but it is definitely one of the more satisfying.