Well, we made it through week 1 and 2 of the new course. As they say, so far so good. Going in to the week I was 50% excited, 50% terrified. I get to teach a class similar to my research, instruct students on how to film animal movement using high-speed cameras and talk about topics close to my interests and research (50% excited). However, since this is a authentic research experience based on student driven research questions and hypotheses, I have no idea what they will come up with, what performance or function they will ask, how feasible it will be, and since we are relying on locally collected invertebrates (plus some from a colleague and biological supply companies), I am concerned we will not get enough specimens. So, 50% terrified.
However, we got into class on Monday and got the ball rolling
. We spent Monday going over logistics of the course, introductions of the class, some basic camera principles, and then got into filming. Every student held a hissing cockroach (good for an organismal course), and every student captured a high speed video of something moving. The video was part of their first assignment, worth 5 points and based off the following rubric I created to ensure they understand what makes a good video for analysis (Video test rubric).
On Wed. I got in some animals from a biological supply company, including fiddler crabs, crayfish, dragon fly nymphs, damselfly larvae, American cockroaches and German cockroaches. In class we discussed the morphology, performance fitness paradigm and spent time defining terms. Lecture and discussion was based off chapter 1 in Animal Athletes.
Monday was a holiday, so no lab time. On Wednesday students submitted their first paper summary, where they had to find a paper from the primary literature relevant to the class. The following rubric was used (Paper Summary Rubric). Lecture focused on the factors that can affect performance and we discussed a recent paper, Winchell et al. 2018.Linking locomotor performance to morphological shifts in urban lizards. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Next week we will practice getting videos on animals, introduce digitizing and kinematics, and discuss muscle physiology.