Promoting interactive learning: A classroom exercise to explore foraging strategies

We describe a classroom exercise to allow students to explore foraging strategies in higher vertebrates. The exercise includes an initial interactive session in which students act as predators and are guided through foraging simulations, and a subsequent student-led session where classmates are employed as experimental subjects. Students rated the exercise, which utilises only cheap and widely available resources, significantly more highly than another more traditional module element in terms of development of both biological understanding and transferable skills for the workplace. As current trends are towards making tertiary level bioscience teaching more challenging and engaging, our experiences with this exercise support its introduction on a larger scale to undergraduate biology and ecology curricula.

We describe a classroom exercise to allow students to explore foraging strategies in higher vertebrates. The exercise includes an initial interactive session in which students act as predators and are guided through foraging simulations, and a subsequent student-led session where classmates are employed as experimental subjects. Students rated the
exercise, which utilises only cheap and widely available resources, significantly more highly than another more traditional module element in terms of development of both biological understanding and transferable skills for the workplace. As current trends are towards making tertiary level bioscience teaching more challenging and engaging, our experiences with this exercise support its introduction on a larger scale to undergraduate biology and
ecology curricula.

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