On Nov. 23, the Carmel Education Foundation awarded a grant to both CHS’s AP Biology and Anatomy and Physiology courses to purchase a classroom set of electrophysiology equipment after Xuchen Wei, lead author of the grant and sophomore, decided to write a proposal in May.

“Basically, I wanted to add a lab to the curriculum, since I thought some of the AP Biology labs were kind of lacking. We didn’t have a lab in the official curriculum for the communication unit other than doing this thing with pill bugs which wasn’t all that scientific,” Wei said via email. “I thought this would be a good place to insert a new lab. I then just looked online for lab ideas, and I discovered this site called ‘Backyard Brains’ that has some really cool labs introducing students to neuroscience.”

Daniel Marble, AP Biology teacher and announcer of the grant, said he agrees with and approves of Wei’s purpose for writing his grant.

“(The equipment) is a good thing; it allows us to do some neat experiments and neat activities that we wouldn’t probably otherwise have the money or materials to do,” Marble said. “So, if you can make simple measurements about the nervous system and certain animals like humans, earthworms or cockroaches, then you have a better understanding of an important aspect about biology.”

According to Wei and Marble, students will be able to study neurology by utilizing the electrophysiology equipment for an earthworm lab.

“I thought the earthworm lab was a good fit because it was relatively simple and also pretty interesting. I adapted the lab for our classrooms
and wrote a protocol of sorts, though it was mostly based on the website,” Wei said. “I then figured out what equipment we need and wrote that down, along with the costs. As for the rest of the grant, it was just a few short paragraphs about why it would be useful and such.”

Marble also said he encourages students to take the opportunity to benefit from the equipment as they use it to study neurophysiology.

“What’s neat about this is that you can work on this with not only earthworms, but with other animals like cockroaches and human muscles and lots of other things. You can use it to study lots of things,” Marble said. “I never have used (the equipment) before, so I am interested in how I can come up with multiple experiments and have kids maybe design their own experiments using it too and see how creative the kids are as well.”