Creature Lab lesson plans
Each one is a class period with everything to run it: a teacher plan, a student worksheet, an exit ticket with answers, and the standards it meets. Students need no account, and a free class saves their work.
Creature Lab: How Far Can a Body Bend?
Three creatures circle in a pond: a snake coils into a ring, a lizard just closes one, and a fish only makes a C. Students look under the skin and find that each body is a chain of joints, every joint following the one ahead and bending only so far. They add up the angles, predict which bodies can curl all the way around, and then find how flexible the fish must be to close its ring.
On Teachers Pay TeachersCreature Lab: Program a Creature's Brain
A fish turns and dashes for every pellet a student drops. Students open its brain and find three rules, each a sense and an action, run top to bottom many times a second. They change what it can sense, add a rule that makes it stop when it is full, and find that the same rule does nothing at the top of the list and everything at the bottom. By the end, they can read the rules as if statements in code and predict what a creature will do before they test it.