"Alright, settle down. Take your seats. The bell has rung. Class is
starting," said Mr. Wiggleston closing the classroom door.
The students stopped fidgeting and talking and looked straight ahead.
They were curious about the new machine up at the front of the room.
It looked like a cross between a dentist's chair, a hair dryer, and
high-end gaming computer.
"That's better. Now I know most of you are probably curious about
this device. It's on loan to us from Exocorp's R&D department. How
many of you saw the movie Avatar?"
Hands went up.
"Good that's most of you," he continued, "Well, this is sort of like
that it's a simulator which will let you be virtually any known animal
in its database. It catalogs over 12,533 different animal species
currently. Over the next few weeks each one of you will have a chance
to try it out. I want you each to individually or in groups design an
experiment where you will become an animal. You need to achieve
something specific as part of your experiment. For example, you could
become a snake and determine which sense works best for hunting. Is
it vision or the Jacob's gland or smell or something else? Or you
could become an ant and see just how much weight an ant can lift
relative to its bodyweight. Or a group of you could become cows and
see which diet produces the best milk yields."
"Now I'm passing out the handouts which detail your animal choices,
and the form for you to fill out describing your experiment. You may
spend the rest of the class hour working on your experiment, but at
the end of class I will collect each of your completed proposals to
review them and make sure they are legitimate experiments."
"Mr. Wiggleston?"
"Yes, Jeremy?"
"Do you have to become a specific animal or can you just select parts
of specific animals? I mean like, could I give myself rabbit ears to
see how they work on a human body? And then compare it with elephant
ears, and maybe snake's ears?" Jeremy asked.
"That's a very innovative idea, Jeremy, and we may do comparative body
specializations with the machine for our second set of experiments,
but this initial experiment we are to select only one animal to study.
As you will note on the handout, Individual organs and body parts can
be targeted, but again that won't be done in this experiment."