String up a message. Pupils string together colored beads to code a word or short phrase. Each color represents one of the four DNA bases. Using a combination of three bases, learners create an amino acid that stand for each letter of the message. Classmates exchange strands and decode the message.

Concepts

dna, dna sequence, rna, amino acids, covid-19, viruses, protein

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Additional Tags

science

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Instructional Ideas

• Provide clear instruction that helps individuals understand that a single letter abbreviation of an amino acid is used to code messages
• Conduct a lesson on how DNA is a carrier of a message

Classroom Considerations

• Requires using colored beads

Pros

• Provides a scientific explanation of how nucleotides encode each amino acid
• Includes an example of a message

Cons

• It is not very clear about how to use the Codon table to create a message