The laboratory course gives students practical experience working with the concepts introduced in lecture. Activities at the Biocore Prairie restoration site are a major focus during the first part of the semester. Later projects deal with evolutionary relationships, interactions between organisms, adaptations, Mendelian genetics, cytogenetics, and genetic linkage. This is a writing intensive course with an emphasis on students making observations and generating and testing their own ideas. They report their observations and hypotheses and analyze their data in papers describing each of the projects.