Labs and Activities

Muscle Lab

After learning about the 3 types of muscle tissue and how muscles work, the Body Quest class put this knowledge to the test in a Muscle Lab. Students had the chance to view cells of all 3 types of muscle tissues under a microscope and note information they found regarding each cells' striations, nucleus count, intercalated disks, and much more.

Chicken Wing Lab

To practice dissection techniques and to learn more about how muscles can move bones, students skinned grocery store chicken wings. By peeling off the skin, they were able to see, feel, and study actual muscle tissue using a raw chicken wing. They were also able to see bones and a large tendon. By pinching the muscles together and pulling on tendons, students were able to make the wings flap.

Fetal Pig Dissection #1

During the first step in the dissection of a fetal pig, students focused on removing the outer layer of skin and fascia using forceps, scalpels, scissors, and dissecting needles, allowing the superficial muscles to become visible. Major muscles, including the intercostals, pectoralis major, biceps femoris, sternomastoid, and internal and external obliques were visible.

Fetal Pig Dissection #2

Students further dissected our pigs, this time through the ventral abdominal muscles including the external and internal obliques, the transversus abdominis, and the pectoralis major, to make the internal organs visible. Efforts were focused on identifying major organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, gallbladder, and liver.

Adult Pig Hearts

Due to the small size of fetal pigs, it is hard to properly see all of the interesting valves, chambers, and blood vessels that make up both pig and human hearts. As an alternative to dissecting the fetal pig's hearts, Body Quest students used adult pig hearts from a nearby slaughterhouse to gain better visualization. They looked at the aorta, superior and inferior vena cava, coronary arteries, pulmonary veins, and pulmonary arteries on the outside of the hearts, and examined the atria and ventricles, semilunar and bicuspid valves, cordae tendonae, and the ventricular septum inside the hearts.

Old City Cemetery Field Trip

The Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, which was opened in 1806, is the site not only of many gravestones, but two historic museums.

First, the class visited the Pest House, which was Lynchburg's first hospital, to learn about Civil-War era medical techniques, including smallpox vaccinations, chloroform anesthesiology, and cupping and bloodletting to balance the body's "humors". In an era before germ theory and bacteriology, medicine was a very different field, and the museum showcased many of the important ideas of the time.

They then stopped by the Station House to see an old-fashioned train station that closed down during WW1. Lynchburg was a big railroad town, which had allowed it to be a hospital town during the Civil War and afterward.

Students were also able to stop by a goat pen to see the animals hard at work, maintaining the grounds (by eating the weeds).

Anatomage Table and Virtual Dissection

With Professor Stevens, student were able to look at and use the Anatomage Virtual Anatomy Dissection table that the University owns. They looked at various muscles, blood vessels, internal organs, bones, and nerves on a realistic, life-sized image. Students used the table's labeling features to practice our muscle system memorization, and learned about the differences between a fetal pig and human body.

Blood Typing Lab

After learning about various blood types and why they're important for blood transfusions and organ transplants, students in Body Quest learned how to complete a blood typing test. They added Anti-A, Anti-B and Anti-D serums to synthetic blood (for safety reasons) and looked for coagulation reactions taking place.

Fetal Pig Dissection #3

Using a scalpel, scissors, dissecting needles, and bone cutters, each group dissected to view their pig's brain and/or spinal cord. Due to the tissue's delicacy, it was a time-consuming practice that helped students hone their dissecting skills. Major features, including the gyri, fissures, and meninges, distinct vertebral sections, and spinal nerves were noted.

Cow Eye Dissection

After removing the excess fat and muscle surrounding the preserved cow eyes, students cut them in half using a scalpel and scissors. Inside the eyes, they were able to see the retina, tapetum, vitreous humor, lens, cornea, retina, pupil, and iris, as well as the optic nerve on the outside.

Eye Testing

Students tested their own eyesight with a variety of different methods to measure peripheral vision, location of rods and cones, astigmatisms, color blindness, farsightedness, and nearsightedness.

Cadaver Lab

Students from the Body Quest class joined Science of Strength students on a field trip to the University of Lynchburg's Doctorate of Physical Therapy program, where a cadaver lab had been taking place. Governor's school students were allowed to examine the cadavers (which were already dissected to reveal muscles, the thoracic cavity, and the abdominal cavity), bend joints, tug on tendons, and find nerves. The hearts and lungs had already been removed, so students could observe human-sized aortae, arteries, and veins.

Reaction Time and Balance Lab

There were two sections to this lab activity: one part focused on finding differing reaction times for visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli; the other part determined the difficulty of balancing in various positions. For the reaction section of the lab, one lab partner would hold a meter stick straight up and would drop it through their partner's hand. Their partner would try to catch it as soon as it fell (the distance of the subject's fingers from the end of the meter stick would determine how fast they reacted to either seeing it fall, hearing it fall, or being tapped when it fell). The balance portion of the lab focused on timing to see how long students could stand in a variety of positions (tiptoe, one leg out to the front, one leg out to the side, etc.) with either vision or no vision, and with their head either positioned level or tilted back. Each of these positions can affect how well the inner ear can balance, and affects the time of balancing significantly.

Vaccine Demonstration

As a class, we ran through 2 infectious disease scenarios in which a mysterious illness was spreading rapidly. In the first version, an infected person was contagious for 2 days, and each day, they could infect 1 person near them, before recovering and becoming immune. In the second version, the illness was the same, but half of the class was vaccinated and spread out randomly. We learned the principle of herd immunity by noting that, although only half of the class was "vaccinated", the disease was halted after infecting only a few people, while in the first scenario, everybody caught the illness.

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