Best examples of interactive dichotomous keys

March 25, 2017 4:56 PM

I am looking for examples of interactive dichotomous keys to use in a lesson on creating dichotomous keys. The few I've found have been... too cutesy and aimed at younger people. Do you know of any that are simple to follow, but not dumbed-down?

I know I've seen better ones online, but I can't seem to find them now!
I'd also be willing to make my own, if an easy browser-based tool is available to do that. My programming skillset is virtually nil, though

The intended audience is adults doing high school biology.

I have a few sets of objects for them to make their own keys, but I'm also open to interesting ideas for that, too.

I have years of experience working with keys, so I'm trying to be careful not to just breeze past this topic, and to try to make it at least a bit fun.

posted by Acari to Science & Nature (5 answers total)

I have used this one to identify trees for myself and I have also used it with my middle school students.
posted by mai at 6:40 PM on March 25, 2017

Here's one for spiders.
posted by dhruva at 11:41 PM on March 25, 2017

Go Botany's is excellent.
posted by mmw at 7:27 AM on March 26, 2017

Keybase hosts several different keys used by working scientists. These can be challenging to use (require working knowledge of plant anatomy), but the integration of filtering into the keys is awesome.
posted by agentofselection at 11:27 AM on March 26, 2017

One of the best lessons I remember with my 8th grade science class was when I had them do a dichotomous key using nuts and bolts. I divided them into teams, and provided each team with a bag containing the exact same number/type of bolts/screws/nuts, and gave them one class period to come up with a dichotomous key, explaining why they classified things the way they did (we'd previously explored the concept of classification and dichotomous keys).

Next class period each team presented theirs, observations were made, and finally we compared all.

They came up with some amazing things.

Here's a few ways people have come up with:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/nuts_and_bolts/nuts_and_bolts.html

http://www.angelfire.com/de/nestsite/ISCI2001ClassifyLab.html

http://secondary.mysdhc.org/science/documents/Bio1/LabsAndActivities/Classification/Nails%20Screws.pdf
posted by subajestad at 3:29 PM on March 28, 2017 [1 favorite]