Robert Pennock is a professor in the Lyman Briggs College with a focus on evolutionary and ecological sciences. He was recently named as one of MSU’s University Distinguished Professors in 2019.
There are some special challenges about teaching evolution. We often talk about evolutionary theory, but evolution is not just a theory - it’s an explanatory framework that makes sense of everything you see in the world.
Darwin discovered how variation is inheritable and that subject and natural selection will produce descent with modification. We can now do this in a digital system with, not DNA that involves, but computer code that evolves.
At the BEACON Center, students aren’t just learning about evolutionary science; they’re learning about practices of science. You don’t want to just tell students what science is discovered, you want to be able to get them to actually do it themselves so that they begin to feel like a scientist, and that’s what Avida-ED is meant to do. Instructors now come to us to learn how to use the software and it’s now used around the world.
Reused with permission from WKAR.