Playing with Clay in College

Studying anatomy can be pretty straight forward when you have a list of things you must know and identify. Physiology starts to warp their minds when they have to figure out how things work. Anatomy can be difficult when all the things look the same and are the same shade of tan or grey. I am talking about a brain. A preserved sheep brain, specifically. It looks like a squiggly blob and then they get a list of things they have to identify and know what it does.

So we are actually talking about ‘brain surgery’ here. Where can you cut or if you cut what will you affect?

To get my students to really figure out the brain in a 3-D way I have them play with clay.

During my brain lab, I begin with asking students to build a brain. They are using clay and have to build a three dimensional brain including all the features they have to know about. My online students have to do the same thing. All my students build a brain. When they are done, they have to tell their classmates about it. In class, each student group (they sit at round-ish tables) will have one representative that ‘presents’ their brain. Then the class votes for the best one. Online students do this individually. They have to make a brain with clay and post a video to their blog pointing out each of the features Fellow students then comment on their colleague’s brain.

Students laugh when I first present this assignment, but then are excited to get to work. Some of them are fantastic and very detailed. The activity forces every student to do something and get involved in the learning as they each have to make different parts of the brain, even if there is one person putting it together. It is very much a collaborative project.

After students complete their clay brain and have presented it to the class (or video) then they "get to dissect" a preserved sheep brain. Students then show me the same features from their list that they had to know and make for their clay brain. I have found that students do so much better on learning the brain features and functions when they do the clay brain activity first. I noticed a significant improvement in brain identification and regional understanding when the clay brain project was incorporated compared to previous semesters when I was not using the clay activity. The purchase of clay is included in my syllabus class requirements now and I have expanded it to also make a clay model of any eye before dissecting a cow eye.