An innovative, educational computing platform developed by University at
Buffalo faculty members and hosted by the cloud (remote, high-capacity,
scalable servers) is helping UB students understand parts of
evolutionary biology on an entirely new level. Soon, high-school and
middle-school students will benefit from the same tool as well.
Pop! World, developed by UB faculty members with a $250,000 National
Science Foundation grant, takes advantage of cloud computing, which
allows programs to run on remote servers instead of through departmental
or institutional servers. That feature allows resource-intensive
programs to serve many users regardless of their physical location
without sacrificing speed or quality of service.
"The cloud serves as a way to distribute resources for free without
limits on how many people can access it and with no regard to what kind
of computer you are downloading to," says Jessica Poulin, PhD, research
assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the
College of Arts and Sciences, who developed Pop! World with principal
investigator Bina Ramamurthy, PhD, research associate professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Katharina Dittmar, PhD, assistant
professor of biological sciences. "Everybody can get there."
UB faculty members designed Pop! World because they wanted to get
college students more excited about population genetics; they also
wanted to maintain the university's unique freshman lab requirements at a
time when resources are growing more scarce.
UB is one of the few universities in the U.S. that encourages
freshmen interested in biology to begin experiencing labs during their
first semester on campus.
"We put our freshmen right into labs because students who might
otherwise be lost from the major are captivated when they get to do
science," Poulin says. "When you sit in a lecture hall with 400 people
and someone is talking about flatworms, what do you care? Despite the
logistical difficulties, and the intense demands on staff time, we think
that getting freshmen into labs is one of our department's great
strengths. We didn't want to discontinue it."
At the same time, Poulin says that it is difficult to convey the main
concepts of population genetics at this level, particularly those that
are mathematically demanding.
Hired in 2008 to revamp UB's evolutionary biology curriculum for Bio
200, Poulin says that the department was seeking ways to maintain and
improve the course and the lab for students without requiring additional
resources, such as teaching assistants.
"Almost all of evolutionary theory can be mathematically modeled if
you know enough information to begin with," she says. "If you enter the
correct parameters into the computer, the computer will tell you what
will happen after one generation or a thousand generations. I wanted
students to be exposed to something that made them feel they were
actually watching evolution happen. I wanted it to be captivating."
While some computational tools exist to help students with population
genetics -- the mathematical analysis of evolution -- the result is
often nothing more dramatic than a line graph.
"Our students grew up in the Internet age surrounded by MP3 players,
wireless phones and social networking apps," says Ramamurthy, "so the
visual aspects of Pop! World are certainly very appealing to them."
The UB team programmed Pop! World in Adobe Flash, which lends a
highly visual, nearly tactile look to the program. While the current
version illustrates evolution with red and green lizards, it is highly
adaptable, so it can be used with any population of organisms. It also
is highly scalable, so that it can be made more complex, to serve the
needs of population genetics researchers, or less complex, to serve the
needs of middle- and high-school students.
A preliminary version of Pop! World is running on the Google App Engine Cloud. It can be accessed by going to
http://popworld15.appspot.com/.
With the help of the NSF grant, the UB team is now creating a
sophisticated version of the tool, expected to be available by Fall
2011.
"Our idea was to use general principles of population genetics not
only to convey the principle in the context of evolutionary biology but
to make sure that students understand visually what's happening with the
mathematics behind it," explains Dittmar.
When an early version of Pop! World was used to teach evolutionary
biology last summer, students and teaching assistants responded
enthusiastically.
"The TAs loved it because it facilitated their explanations of a very complicated problem," Poulin says.
"Pop! World gives students the visual background they need to
understand complex mathematical problems," Dittmar adds. "And it works
kind of like a video game, which serves the current population of
undergrads well."
That visual appeal is also expected to go far with middle-school and
high-school biology students, groups the UB team hopes to excite about
evolution; by spring, they expect to have completed a modified version
for them as well.
By making evolutionary biology more visually appealing and, thus,
more accessible, Poulin hopes that Pop! World will make evolution itself
a more appealing subject for secondary schools to teach.
"There's a huge disconnect," she says. "The universities all accept
evolution as fact. It's not a question. But many high schools and middle
schools don't want to touch it. They don't want to deal with the
politics of it."
Her hope is that the visual and educational appeal of Pop! World and the ease of using it will begin to change that situation.
The UB team's grant, "A Cloud-enabled Evolutionary Genetics Learning
Tool for Engaging the Cyber-savvy Generation" (NSF OCI CI-Team 1041280)
from the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, will run for two years.
Hongsik Kim, Jungeun Lee and Byunghun Jang, all former UB graduate
students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, also
were involved in the project.
Story Source :
