Teachers are being challenged to engage students in ways that will elevate student interest and understanding of concepts in science and encourage students to gather evidence to support what we know about science. It is critical for teachers to have budget-friendly, supporting activities that are aligned with current educational standards, that are easy to present, and that incorporate a variety of skills important to the study of science. This simulation activity is an inexpensive exercise that challenges students to hypothesize the evolutionary outcome of genotype selection in a population and then gather and analyze a set of unique data. Connections to recent evolutionary changes in familiar organisms ground the activity for students, helping them grasp the importance of such investigative work.

Before beginning a series of presentations on evolution, it would be prudent to survey the general level of students’ understanding of prerequisite basic concepts of reproduction, heredity, ontology, and phenotypic diversity so that teachers can avoid devoting time to well-known subjects of general knowledge and can spend more time on subjects that are unknown, forgotten, or misunderstood by most students. This article outlines a Socratic method for surveying and teaching to address these concerns.