Chicken Races!

So, I have to review genetics as part of my state test curriculum.  A few years back, I got an idea from an old video game my brother and I had found a long time ago.  The game was called Mutant Chicken Races and I was pretty terrible.  Also, it was very fun.  The premise was that you needed to save up money by breeding and racing chickens.

So, I adapted this game to work in a classroom.  I had the students use Punnett Squares to determine the traits of their racing chicken by using the genes from its parents.

These traits directly translated to how the chicken would perform in a race. 

I held a stable of my own racing chickens to compete with them.  If I beat them in a race, they'd have a change to breed a better chicken by looking for favorable traits in parent chickens and combining their genes.  The follow up discussion led to an examination of how humans can use selective breeding to produce the traits we want in a species of animals.