1. "Water We Made Of?" We wanted to present material on the chemical and physical properties of water that are important for life - things like freezing point, surface tension, hydrogen bonding, specific heat. But we couldn't face standing up there and lecturing on it. So one night I wrote this dialogue. It is one of the more complicated to pull off because of the props, water, ice, needles and capillary tubes. Perhaps for this reason, students like this one quite a lot.
This is the original version with B & B on the banks of the Seine. We think it works a little better with a local referent, like a local coffee place or snack bar. And while "Existentialism" adds interest for some, the characters can talk about anything of local interest too.
2. "Bing and Bong at Chez Boeuf Sauvage." I've only used this one in a single year. It's ok, but I have a self-imposed limit on using too many dialogues, and this one has been a little less attractive. On the board in the front of the room I drew a huge diagram of a reflex arc to serve as the "mural." We used a technique we've since developed more fully, including an open ended question the characters have to answer without benefit of the script. (Boeuf sauvage is "bison", by the way.)
3. "Bing and Bong at the Movies." My colleague Chris Barney has been in on the development of this one over several years. We begin with a video episode from "The Blob." This is the Steve McQueen version, and the scene opens with a policeman coming out of the supermarket and saying, 'There's no one in here but us monsters." Then the blob comes out of the movie theatre and engulfs a little diner containing Steve and the other stars. We end the sequence when the owner says, "Hay!! What's da matter?"
Many students assume they did something wrong when they calculate the speed of diffusion for the larger organisms. Be sure to calculate the numbers ahead of time so you can see immediately if they've made errors. Then be ready to discuss the function of circulatory systems. That last point is why we wrote this dialogue.
4. "Bing and Bong at the Health Spa." The point of this one is that there is a loss of useable energy at each step of a food chain. It takes a while to make its point, but it's a very simple, straight forward dialogue.
5. "Bing and Bong in the Histology Prep Room." The point being discussed here is the idea of "Genome Equivalence." B & B discuss how different cell types develop. Bing has to answer a question at the end - the answer is that gene regulation turns different genes off and on in different cells.
6. "Bing and Bong in the Cryptosphere." The "Cryptosphere" is the biome in the leaf litter and the soil just beneath the leaf litter on forest floors. We have our students collect litter and extract the organisms with a Berlese funnel and then identify them. This dialogue is about the value of evolutionary systematics and it capitalizes on the observations the students have just made.
7. "Bing and Bong Go Cycling." Not only do they go cycling; they study cycles, the life cycles of plants and the evolution of those cycles. At the time this was written we were giving regular 10 minute quizzes each week, so we integrated this one with a quiz on the life cycles of ferns and mosses. It is very much in the tradition of Bing and Bong nuttiness, complete with a pocket microscope Bong just happens to have brought along, a parallel between bicycle tires and life cycles and a reference to a doughnut and eggroll stand (which at that time really did exist in Holland, Michigan).
8. "Bing and Bong at the Backyard Barbecue." One of the duo is barbecuing some delicious dinner when along comes a killjoy to point out what meat actuallly is. This "naturally" leads to a discussion about the ethics of using animal in research. this illustrates the possibilities of using dialogues as discussion starters for controversial topics.
9. "The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium." Perhaps this one is in the tradition of those docu-dramas one sees on TV. Yule and Hardy stand in for Bing and Bong, and Yule and Hardy are real historical characters. I do not know if they ever met, but if they had, I would like to think that this is what they would have done. The dialogue is based on Hardy's paper describing the equilibrium that now bears his name. So I used his somewhat cumbersome method of describing and calculating the equilibrium, and I adopted his attitude toward the mathematical ability of biologists. This one was written originally for the 1994 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Institute on genetics.