This is a bit of a weird one. Its one of 5 pieces of coursework for this course, but this only counts 5% towards the total of assessed work. You have to pick a sort of project thing to do that explores evolution a bit There are 4 projects on offer.
- Bird Predation Project -this is where you bake little bits of coloured pastry and look to see if there is selection of the bait favoured by the birds coming to feed on it in your garden.
- Conservation genetics project -Looking at two different species of tree or flower and making measurements.
- Hybridisation project -A computer based butterfly project, where you look at microsatellite information to see what populations of butterflies exhibit and how related they are.
- Snail shell project -collecting common garden snails and looking at the banding on them. This is an extension of the S170 work.
Anyway - apparently this TMA is a forerunner for TMA-4 which counts for 30% of the marks, and requires you to write up two experiements for the project. So this TMA is for you to make mistakes in, and mess up calculations and graphs so it can be corrected.
I spent a long time on it though, far longer than the 5% justified. However I hope quite a lot of it will be reusable for the TMA4.
The TMA also has a proforma like thing where it tells you what data to put in, what calculations to make and what questions to answer, so it is fairly easy to tick all the boxes.
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