Intended for use in a college-preparatory or advanced high school biology course.
Students work in collaborative groups.
Students are required to use knowledge from the course to solve a puzzle. The class watches a video. The complete activity requires a minimum of four forty-minute class periods. This is achieved by first transcribing a DNA segment, given to the team, into mRNA, determining the amino acid sequence that is coded on the mRNA, and then using a code that assigns each amino acid to a letter or other element of sentence structure. No single research team is given enough information to decipher the entire message.