Co-evolution
 In this activity, each student was represented as the same specie of bird but with different kinds of beaks, which were represented by spoons, forks, and knives.  What we had to do with our "beaks" was to eat food and in order for us to get the food in our stomach, we had to use our beaks to get the beans into the hand that wasn't holding the utensil.  At the start of the activity, each type of food--macaroni, split peas, red beans, and white beans--had 100 pieces.  As the activity advanced, depending on how much of each food was consumes, would either increase or decrease.  Over time, the amount of macaroni and the red beans decreased significantly (macaroni had zero remaining, red beans had 5 for the final generation), while the white beans increased when the red beans and macaroni were present but decreased when the macaroni was gone and the number of red beans became low (went from 100, to 115, to 131, to 95, to 34) and the split peas greatly increased over time.  What would dictate how many of each food would advance to the next generation would be by multiplying by the starting amount (400) by the percentage remaining after the generation.  For example, in the first generation, there were 47 macaronis consumed, which left 53 remaining.  In order to calculate the amount remaining, we divided the amount of macaroni remaining by the total amount of food remain, which was 288, and that gave us ~0.184%. Then, in order to calculate how many macaronis would be passed onto the next generation, we multiplied 0.184 by 400, which gave us 74 macaronis that would be left for the next generation to eat.  It was a similar process in calculating how many birds would advance.  First, we would add up how many items were eaten in each group.  For example, the knife beak ate 5 total items of food.  In order to calculate the percentage of how much food was consumed, we divided how much food we ate (5) by the total amount of food eaten, and in this case, it was 112, and this gave us the percentage of 0.045%.  In order to arbitrate how many people would survive in that generation, we would multiply the percentage of the food food eaten (0.045%) by the number number of participants, which was 23.  In this case, since very few food was consumed, only one specie with a beak survived.  Because the rest of the knife beaks died off and the other bird with fork and spoon beaks at more, those birds were able to reproduce more.  As our population died off, we took the place as the offspring in the future generations of the better fed groups.  Co-evolution was present in this activity because the birds whose beaks weren't best-adapted to scoop up the beans, that population would die off.  If the split peas would have continued to go uneaten, eventually their population would have died off, too.  However, over time, the birds started to develop beaks that were better suited to scoop up the beans.  Although we couldn't adapt the split peas to become easier to scoop, over time in the real world, their species would have developed into one that would be easier to scoop up with the birds' respective beaks.  One thing that a partner and I did was work together to scoop up beans since we were both struggling doing so alone.  For example, when we had knives, we would trap the bean between the two knives, lift up the bean, and put it in one of our stomachs.  Overall, the activity was a great way to demonstrate co-evolution, and if I were to ever teach it in future classes, this would be a good way to introduce the concept of co-evolution.

These are examples of two spoon beaks and two knife beaks.