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Tossing Clementines

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In order to get students to participate in lecture, Pardis Sabeti t hrows clementines to anyone who answers a question correctly or incorrectly. She says that c lementines are perfect for this in that they are soft, right-sized, projectile, and nutritious...

Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science

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This course teaches students the skill and process of solving problems in discrete mathematics through active participation in every class. Rather than meeting for lectures, the class is a series of problem-solving sessions. Before class, students...

Neurobiology Family Feud

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In section for MCB 80, "Neurobiology of Behavior," students play a game similar to Family Feud to review material discussed in lecture. Graduate student Julio Perez uses this activity for his section. In every section, the class is divided into two equal...

Unobtrusive Experiments

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In Joshua Greene's course, "Social Psychology," students design and run their own original "unobtrusive experiments" as the final project for the class. Students read and conduct background research to get ideas, write a proposal and refine it with the...

Stock Market Game

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In past offerings of EM-16: Real-Life Statistics, students virtually invested in the stock market in order to apply statistics concepts. After learning concepts like expected value, variance, and regression toward the mean, students formed teams and...

Choose Your Own Fish

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In Patterns & Processes in Fish Diversity (OEB 130), Professor George Lauder's students create entries for the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Students choose a fish that does not yet have an entry or only has a very sparse entry on the EOL. Students can...

Live String Quartet Performances

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In Anne Shreffler's freshman seminar on Beethoven's String Quartets, students in the class perform excerpts from the music being studied in practically every class. To allow this, Professor Shreffler selects some musicians among the applicants for the...

Adopt a Country

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In Societies of the World 24, Global Health Challenges: Complexity of Evidence-based Policy, students "adopt" a country to follow and research for the semester. During each section, there is usually some activity in which students explore the country they...

Paper Presentations and Discussions

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In OEB 119: Deep Sea Biology, groups of students have to present and lead discussions on scientific papers throughout the semester. Before class each week, all students have to read an assigned scientific paper and post a summary paragraph and two...

Sounding China

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This was a semester long project. Throughout the semester, graduate students (many of whom had little previous exposure to the course material) studied the history of Chinese music theory, the Jesuit missionaries who transmitted it back to western Europe...

Analyzing Andean Artifacts

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Each week in "Pathways through the Andes," students examine and discuss 10-15 objects from the collection of the Harvard Peabody Museum. Students complete assigned readings on the various kinds of artifacts before their section meets in the object study...

Data Systems Interactive Quiz

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Using an interactive quiz as a teaching tool, the teaching team works with small groups of students to solve the quiz. Goal : To promote creative thinking; to have students undergo the research process; to communicate concepts and scientific results...