Collaborative Cladistics of Candy

In this activity, students grapple with the ambiguous and computationally intensive science of taxonomy - using only pencils and paper, their brains, and fistfuls of candy. Teams of four students divide up tasks (such as trait researcher, scientific illustrator, etc.) and try to create a parsimonious cladogram describing the “evolution” of their candy “species.” At the end of the exercise, teams compare their cladograms and debate the differences.