The Breeder's Choice: How Do Breeders Make a Trait Common?
Sim Lesson
Students use The Breeder's Choice simulation to choose parent birds, keep offspring with a target trait, and breed across generations, seeing that selective breeding makes a desired trait more common. Lesson Purpose Students often think selecting for a trait changes an individual animal. Breeding across generations shows that artificial selection changes how common a trait is in the whole flock.
People have bred dogs, crops, and farm animals for thousands of years to get the traits they want, like a certain color or size. How does choosing which animals become parents change a whole population over time? In this lesson, you will use The Breeder's Choice simulation to select which birds breed and watch a chosen trait spread through the flock.
Topics and standards: Science, Biology, Simulation, Inheritance, Natural Selection, Heredity & Variation of Traits, Evolution & Species Dynamics, Genomics, SC.7.L.16.4, TEKS Science 7.13.D, 8-LS4-5, MS-LS4-5, 3.1.6-8.R