Bringing non-academic enjoyment to the Spring semester
By Christa Bancroft, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Biological Sciences – January 25, 2021
As we are now thinking about entering our second full semester with primarily online classes, I am realizing more and more how important it is going to be to help students make connections within and outside of the classroom. For our freshman students, who don’t have the good memories of being on campus to hang onto as they start a new semester of online class, it’s going to be extra important to have fun activities and interactions to look forward to within their classes and amongst their colleagues.
Dr. Rory Spence and I are reprising our co-teaching duties for a lab section of the second semester of Introductory Biology, BISC 221L. It’s a genomics lab course where students use bioinformatics techniques to analyze and annotate the genome of a newly discovered and sequenced bacteriophage and publish their results on the GenBank database for other scientists to view and use in their own studies. It’s exciting work and we engage freshman in real-life research and highly useful scientific skills, but the first order of business this Spring semester is going to be having some low-stress FUN!
My plan is to host a movie night the first week of school where we watch Gattaca, a 1997 American dystopian science fiction film. It stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. The film presents a vision of a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic selection to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. Although the science might seem a little old-fashioned to our students, its basic ethical debate is highly relevant in our modern scientific world. I look forward to laughing at some of the old-school 1990s content and also having an interesting ethical discussion afterwards about the topics the film brings up.
This works by streaming the movie from your own browser and inviting a group of people to watch at the same time. It also opens up a group chat box, so that you can comment on the movie as it plays but without sound or video to keep the movie watching experience quiet.
Want to do something like this for your class?
You can host a Watch Party using Google Chrome by downloading the Extension “Watch Party” or “Teleparty” and stream movies or shows from Netflix, Disney+, HBO or Hulu. For movies and shows on Amazon Prime, use this link.
Happy watching and having fun with your students!