The Birds and the Beans

In our class, we did an activity where everyone was split into 3 groups. One group all had spoons, one had forks, and the third had knives. We were birds and the plastic-ware was our beaks. We then attempted to collect different kinds of beans and pasta shells by using the plastic-ware to scoop and get into our opposite hand.

This was a very interesting and fun activity. It was a very unique way of demonstrating natural selection. The people with knives had a tougher time collecting beans than everyone else, so in the end the majority of that group died off, while the spoons and forks grew in population.

I started in the knife group, but after the first round I was moved to the fork group because the knife group didn't collect enough food, so our group shrunk. My strategy was similar to many others, and that was to work in pairs. One person would push beans onto another person's fork and then they scooped it into their hand. That proved to be very effective, as our numbers grew almost every round. The spoons did the best, but the forks were close for the most part. This activity was a lot of fun and would be a great thing to do in the future with a class of my own.