Of Heart & Kidneys: Hands-On Activities for Demonstrating Organ Function & Repair.

A major challenge in teaching organ development and disease is deconstructing a complex choreography of molecular and cellular changes over time into a linear stepwise process for students. As an entry toward learning developmental concepts, I propose two inexpensive hands-on activities to help facilitate learning of (1) how to identify defects in heart and kidneys and (2) what evolutionarily conserved strategies from organ development can be applied to understand how to repair these defects. The ease of assembling these activities, combined with traffic flow as a metaphor for physiological function of heart and kidneys, provides students the opportunity to explore and discover biological concepts in organ formation and disease.