A teacher at my school asked me if I could add Biology to ZornScience. My first reaction was to say no. I teach Chemistry and AP Chemistry, and my degree is in physics. I have never taught biology, and I did not want to put my name on a course that I could not fully check myself.
What changed my mind was thinking about the students. Many freshmen would benefit from free, well-organized Biology lessons they can open at home, and many of them would benefit even more if those lessons were also available in Spanish. That is the whole reason this site exists for Chemistry and Physics, so leaving out Biology started to feel like the wrong call. The real question became how to do it responsibly when I am not the expert.
What Is Live Now
The Biology course is built from my district’s Biology curriculum, with every page, figure, and question written from scratch. It has 10 units and 74 lessons. Each lesson follows the same format as the Chemistry and Physics lessons:
- Lesson notes with an essential question
- Two or three worked examples, each with a “Show the solution” toggle
- A practice worksheet and a separate answer key
- A slide deck as a PDF
- NGSS alignment at the bottom of the page
All of it is free, and the lesson pages are also available in Spanish. You can find the course at zornscience.org/science/biology and the Spanish version at zornscience.org/es/science/biology.
Seven Virtual Labs
Biology labs are hard to run for every lesson, so I added seven virtual labs that students can do on a Chromebook or phone. In each one, students collect their own data and then write their conclusions later in a document or on a worksheet. The labs have no typed answer boxes of their own. Instead they include a data panel students can copy.
The other three are the Enzyme Activity Lab, the Population Sampling Lab, and the Yeast Fermentation Lab. Right now, six of the seven labs are English only. The Spanish translations are still to do.
How I Checked Work I Could Not Judge Alone
I used Claude to draft the lessons, but I did not trust the drafts on their own. Because I am not a biologist, I set up rules so that mistakes would be hard to publish by accident:
- Draft first, publish second. Each unit was drafted without touching the live site. Nothing went public until I said so, one unit at a time.
- Run the numbers in code. Every calculation in an answer key or worked example was computed before it went into a document.
- Look at every PDF. Worksheets, keys, and slides were rendered and checked for overlapping text, missing figures, and length.
- Get the standards from the source. NGSS text was copied from nextgenscience.org, not written from memory.
- Hunt for loose claims. Words like “every” and “all” were flagged, since biology has exceptions to almost everything.
- All-new figures. Every figure is original black and white line art, with nothing copied from the web or a textbook.
A critical review of a set of pages turned up real problems, which is exactly why I wanted that step. Here are a few examples:
- A sickle cell example blurred DNA and mRNA together. It now shows the DNA change (GAG to GTG) and the mRNA change (GAG to GUG) separately.
- A page said cells “edit” their pre-mRNA. The better word is “process,” since that includes splicing.
- A line called one stage of cellular respiration the only one that needs oxygen. It is the only stage that uses oxygen directly, and the Krebs cycle also stops without oxygen. The page now says both.
- A line about the first approved CRISPR treatment needed a country added, because the United Kingdom approved it before the United States.
- A practice question said a population fell by more than 96%, while its own solution said about 4% remained. The numbers now match.
Several PDFs also kept the old wording after the pages were fixed, so those were rebuilt and checked on the live site. That taught me something about this kind of work: a correction is not finished until every copy of the mistake is gone.
What Is Not Done Yet
I want to be honest about the limits. That critical review covered selected pages, not all 74 lessons, so I cannot say the whole course is error-free. A biology teacher has not yet reviewed it, and that review matters more than any check I can run myself. The Biology pages are public but not yet in the site menus, so that teacher can go through them before I announce the course.
If you teach biology and spot a mistake, please tell me. I would much rather fix it than leave it for a student to learn.
I started this project expecting to be the weak link. It turned out that the habits that matter most when you are not the expert, like checking everything and being open about what is unverified, are good habits for any course. I will post an update here once the review is done.