An Ideal Class Design?

I first wrote the original version of EcoBeaker for a class in ecological methods being taught for ecology graduate students in the marine biology lab in Eilat, Israel. At the time I was just out of undergrad and realized that being a biologist who knew how to program was a good ticket for getting to some fun places. The professor I was working for at the lab had just taken over teaching this class and realized that a simple program to let student practice some of their techniques in simulations before trying them in the field might be useful. All that preamble is by way of saying that I didn't have much role in designing this class, so my impressions as I returned a couple weeks ago to help teach the latest session are from the outside as much as the inside. It's a fun class to teach—not only are the students good, but they practice what they are learning by sampling corals in the reef outside the back door of the lab. So you just have to go snorkeling as part of the job. Shucks. From a teaching perspective, though, the interesting thing about the class is its three-part structure. Each concept is covered through lectures, simulations, and field work, with the latter two always followed by data analysis and presentation. The basic sequence is to introduce some technique through a lecture (calculating indices of distribution, say). The students then run a simulation where they practice the technique in an ideal setting. For instance, they can make a distribution of creatures that they know is patchy, sample this with a known sampling effort, and test whether the statistics from the lecture can identify that distribution. By showing clear results and allowing students to quickly do a lot of practice runs, the simulations help them learn the technique well. They then cement this knowledge by writing a very short report and/or doing a short presentation on their results. For each technique, the class then moves to the field. Students have to plan how they will collect data in the field given a particular goal—do they use quadrats, line transects, or some other sampling unit; how much sampling effort do they need; how should samples be placed; and so on. Then they take the data they collect and analyze it with the same techniques as in the simulations. Of course the real field data is much messier than the simulations, so their presentations of it often lead to discussions of their confidence in the results, things they would have done differently in collecting the data, and other issues typical of real experimental work. The simulations and field work complement each other really well. Without the simulations, students would never get a good feeling for the techniques they are learning because they would only see them once, and on noisy data where they don't know if their results are real or spurious. So the simulations cement the conceptual content of the class. However, the field work lets students see how each easy or difficult it is to use each technique in a real life situation, which is often quite different than the theoretical utility. All together, I think its one of the most effective combinations of teaching techniques I've seen. Having seen it in action in Eilat, it always makes me happy when I hear about other classes using EcoBeaker labs in the same way, as a complement to field exercises.