IBSE on the genetic code. Cracking the code: replicating a scientific discovery.

This article offers a strategy that helps teachers to explore, simply and accessibly, one of the mostchallenging aspects of science teaching: helping their students to appreciate and understand howscience actually works. Acquiring knowledge requires scientists to ask good questions, design and carry out good experiments, and work together to address uncertainty. This is exactly what the students need to do in this activity to crack the genetic code. In the proposed activity, students reproduce the Nirenberg and Khorana experiment to “crack” the genetic code, departing from several DNA and peptide sequences. Along the activity, each team gets new sequences that allow to confirm or discard their initial explanatory models.

Materials to apply the described activity: https://sites.google.com/a/xtec.cat/hacking-the-code/home

An article in catalan on the same activity: Hacking the code: una aproximació indagadora a l’ensenyament del codi genètic, o seguint les passes de Nirenberg i Khorana. Ciències (2013) 25, 20-25 J. Domènech