The Cell Cycle: An Activity Using Paper Plates to Represent Time Spent in Phases of the Cell Cycle

In this activity, students are given the opportunity to combine skills in math and geometry for a biology lesson in the cell cycle. Students utilize the data they collect and analyze from an online onion-root-tip activity to create a paper-plate time clock representing a 24-hour cell cycle. By dividing the paper plate into appropriate phases of the cell’s cycle on the basis of the data they collected, they can visualize the data, hypothesize, and predict how the time spent in each of the phases in the cycle might change in abnormal situations, such as in cancer or other diseases that affect control of the cell cycle.