Fish 'n' chips: A pedagogical path for using an in-class sampling experiment.

This article is based on the mark-recapture activity (capture-recapture). We will (1) document how considering solutions approaches led students (and instructors) to discover a problem inherent in this approach, (2) examine approaches to pooling results from multiple cases, (3) highlight the differences between the framed mathematical problem and the actual practice of ecologists, and (4) propose two sampling activity formats that teachers can choose on the basis of their goals for students. These two formats allow students to mathematically contrast two approaches to handling data or to provide a real-world simulation.