Beginning—Easy to perform; requires little or no prior knowledge.
For up to 32 students working in pairs. This is an introductory genetics activity for a beginning high school or middle school biology course.
Students study the inheritance of grain color using ears of corn. Each grain is the F2 of a cross between a homozygous red corn and a homozygous white corn.
Covers the basics of Mendelian genetics including the inheritance of a single pair of alleles, one of which is dominant and the other recessive. Students score the phenotypes of the F2 and compare their data to their predictions.