Project Description:

Alyssa Perz-Edwards uses her class time in Cell Biology to work with students on critical thinking and problem solving skills, while the students learn terms and facts outside of class. She motivates students from a wide variety of backgrounds to quickly learn a large amount of complex information, and to apply this information, by using Team Based Learning and a tablet PC. Students come to class prepared for tests taken individually and then repeated as a team. The tests are graded immediately, so that Alyssa can use her tablet PC for just-in-time teaching to address student misconceptions revealed by the tests. The tablet PC allows her to sketch and label during class, so that she can immediately address student requests for more explanation and context during class. The students work in teams for rest of class time to apply their new knowledge to solve problems in Cell Biology using skills they will need if they are to be successful in medical school.

Alyssa teaches cell biology in a six-week summer academic enrichment program that offers freshman and sophomore college students intensive and personalized medical school preparation in the Summer Medical and Dental Summer Program at Duke University School of Medicine.

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Project Description:

Merrill Shatzman is in the early stages of creating a new course, “Personal Geographics: Mapping Self Identity”, that will be taught in Spring or Fall 2009. The course, based on traditional printmaking techniques, will focus on combining digital techniques with printmaking and involve faculty from other science and social science disciplines to encourage students to consider new ways that data visualization and mapping are used in personal inquiry and expression.

CIT Strategic Grant funding has been awarded to Shatzman to assist with development of the course. The funding will be used for a student assistant and other expenses to help Shatzman learn more advanced methods with digital graphics tools such as Photoshop and InDesign and to develop help materials, such as short video screen captures, that can be used for reference by students as they use computer graphics and visualization tools in conjunction with more traditional printmaking techniques.

Project start date: 5/22/2008
Funding awarded: $1,800

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Project Description:

Vicki Russell, Director of the University Writing Program, is investigating innovative ways that tutors can work with students on writing assignments, and students can collaborate on writing projects. Russell, using 3d virtual worlds software such as Second Life as a model, is seeking to create a virtual Writing Studio - an online, 3d “space” where students, faculty and writing tutors can collaborate in real time.

Promoting a larger “culture of writing” on the Duke campus, the resource will include spaces for exploring writing resources in non-linear ways to help students during the writing process. The online presence will be a meeting place where writing tutors can assist students with writing assignments and spaces where student organizations can collaborate on writing projects for publication.

Russell has been awarded a CIT Strategic Initiative Grant to facilitate the early stages of her project. Working with Writing Studio tutors and graduate students Richard Musselwhite and Jen Walsh, Russell will use funding from the CIT grant to learn more about Second Life and other virtual worlds applications, investigate virtual worlds tools such as Second Life, Croquet and Protosphere to determine technical suitability for the project, survey students about current and potential virtual worlds interest and use, and develop a plan and paper-prototype that can be used as a blueprint for implementing the future development of a virtual Writing Studio.

The goals of the project are to use the extensive resources for writers available on the Writing Studio Web site as a foundation for creating an interactive virtual learning environment, demonstrating for writers that writing is a dynamic rather than static process. Allowing access to these resources during a tutoring session with students in a real-time virtual environment will provide interactive ways to facilitate writing as recursive rather than linear process. In addition, by creating a virtual environment space for collaborative writing that is expandable and reproducible for other units at Duke, the project will focus on helping writers improve individual written texts and become more self-reflective better writers and provide faculty with tools to help their students become more effective writers and critical thinkers.

Project start date: 5/13/2008
Funding awarded: $4,000

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Project Description:

Five Duke faculty teach voice lessons at Duke and requested hard-drive based camcorders to explore the impact of recording audio and video of voice lessons, classes and performances for immediate or later review by the student and faculty. The voice faculty currently use iPods to record lessons so that students can hear their work for evaluation, but the addition of video would allow faculty to discuss performance problems that have to do with body mechanics, performance, language and communication skills that are manifested in both aural and visual form.

The CIT loaned three hard-drive based camcorders to the faculty to use in voice lessons and preparations for Spring student recitals in courses Music 95, Voice Lessons (50 students); Music 79B, Class Voice (12 students); and Music 179, Advanced Study: Vocal Performance (12 students). The hard-drive based camcorder allowed faculty to randomly access material for playback for discussions with students, in contrast to a traditional tape-based camcorder that would be more cumbersome for these purposes.

Linnartz said that using the camcorder for feedback saved time during lessons, allowing the students to directly see performance issues and how they could improve. “Having video feedback available for immediate student viewing during lessons drastically increased the students’ receptivity to instruction, speeded up their ownership of both the problem and solutions, and created a quicker and more long-lasting change in both technique and performance,” Linnartz noted.

Since the test use of the camcorders proved successful and promising for future work, the faculty are exploring how to obtain a set of camcorders through their department for permanent use in their courses.

Project start date: 2/27/2008
Funding awarded: equipment loan

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Project Description

Julie Reynolds and research associate David Shiffman have compared ArcGIS and Google Earth for undergraduate research projects. ArcGIS is a powerful program, but is very expensive and difficult to learn. Google Earth has fewer analytical tools, but is free and very user friendly. Using data generated by student research projects, David compared the capabilities of both programs.

ArcGIS is undeniably a more powerful tool, but it has several drawbacks. The expense and difficulty of learning ArcGIS makes it impractical for short-term, small-scale projects. Google Earth, in contrast, is powerful enough for small-scale projects such as undergraduate research projects and large mapping project that do not require quantitative analysis.

These results are being prepared for publication, and will be used to guide future undergraduate research projects.

Below, left image was created in ArcGIS, image on the right is the same data in Google Earth.

Project start date: 4/1/2008
Funding awarded: $1800

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Project Description

In Gereffi’s Marketing and Management capstone course, undergraduate students collect and analyze data involving several key North Carolina industries, helping Gereffi and his team (the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness) create visualizations like value chains and maps for the public and highly-visible North Carolina and the Global Economy website.

CIT is providing funding and support to help Gereffi and his team develop interactive representations of value chains using tools like Flash, and to explore the use of mapping tools like Google Earth to rethink the way industry data can be presented visually in a more global context. The resulting developments will in turn create more and varied projects for undergraduate students in Gereffi’s capstone course.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $11,000

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Project Description

This project will create an effective molecular model of drug action to engage students and teach basic chemical and biological principles, like oxidation, enzyme action, and genetic polymorphisms. An interdisciplinary team of students in Pharmacology 197 and 198 (Research Independent Study in Science Education, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008) has selected, planned, and created a three dimensional, interactive, immersive animation of molecules interacting. In the Duke immersive Visualization Environment (DiVE), students can see and manipulate the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase as it binds to NAD+ and alcohol molecules to oxidize alcohol. Over the summer of 2008, student Marcel Yang is perfecting the model, with input from students in the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP) and LEAP (Launch into Education About Pharmacology, a science enrichment program for rising 10th & 11th grade students) program.

During the Fall of 2008, another team member, Dave McMullen, will test whether freshman chemistry student learning of basic concepts is enhanced when exposed to the interactive model either in the DiVE or on a flat screen, compared to the “textbook” style of content delivery.

When this project is completed, it will be entered into the NSF Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

photo credit:  Les Todd

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 6,500

Additional information:

Duke University Visualization Technology Group

RISE (Raising Interest in Science Education)

Other projects by Pharmacology 150

Duke Center for Science Education

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Project description

To introduce authentic research methods and give students practice in research, students in the Methods Primate Field Ecology course used three Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking collars to track primates at the Duke University Lemur Center. Combining these data with Google Earth would illustrate the lemur’s use of three-dimensional space.

The GPS collars were placed on three lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center during the Fall 2007 semester, but none of the collars functioned and no data was collected. Replacement collars are expected. This authentic research experience allowed students to gain first hand experience in the challenges of field work and cutting edge technology. When the tracking collars are replaced, other students will participate in this research experience. Below, lemurs with tracking collars.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $3,200

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Project Description

Portier-Young applied to the CIT for funding to adapt a publicly available 3D model of the ancient Israelite Tabernacle and Temple for for viewing in the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), by students in her course “Introduction to Old Testament Interpretation.” Portier-Young wanted students to better understand the design of the site and its use in worship activities by seeing the site on a full scale “virtual” tour.

The Virtual Tabernacle is a model of a key worship site used by the ancient Israelites; the model allows the user to see the layout of the site and explore it as a “walkthrough.” Since there is only minimal evidence in original texts about the site’s layout and construction, the model provided a starting point for discussions about interpretation of Old Testament texts.

Student assistants working with the DiVE director adapted the existing 3D model for the display equipment in the facility. In addition, funding was provided for a student assistant to handle the logistics of testing the model and taking the 170 students in the course on the tour in small groups.

All of the students in Portier-Young’s class viewed the tour and several faculty from the Divinity School examined the model to consider using it in their own courses. Portier-Young developed a survey instrument for individuals who viewed the model. The survey results indicated that the students felt the model increased their comprehension of the ancient site and how it was used; viewing the model in an immersive environment allowed the students to see the actual scale of the site and gain a deeper understanding of the site’s components and explore open questions about how worship would have been conducted, based on evidence in the Old Testament texts.

Project start date: 1/25/2007
Funding awarded: $3,325

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Project description

EOS223S is an open, interdisciplinary elective in Nicholas School which satisfies a seminar requirement of Trinity undergrads; it includes topics in geology, engineering, energy, environment, and policy. The course focused on the actual conditions and plans for a US national high-level nuclear waste deposit in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, through a guided field trip to the Yucca Mountain site. Pre-field trip classes included lectures on Yucca Mountain geology and student-prepared seminars/posters on specific aspects of Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal. Geology requires students to visualize both scales and complex three dimensional relationships from 2 dimensional maps, which is particularly difficult for non-majors. The Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE Tank) provided three dimensional visualization of the geology and subsurface engineering, and an interactive way to explore the scale of the field site.

By the end of the course, students stated that the use of the 3-D Visualization before the field trip helped to frame the spatial relationships between sediment layers, faults, and topography. The students were asked write a position paper on the integrated geological, economic, and social aspects of the proposed site and state their position on its licensing using the graphical evidence. Their papers showed that they achieved most of the following goals: they referenced appropriate data bases of existing documents, and related these materials to the actual scales lengths, including time, space, economic, social, and political dimensions associated with the potential site and its use.

Project start date: May 26, 2006
Funding awarded: $5,000

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