Visualizing Protein Interactions and Dynamics: Evolving a Visual Language to Support Learning in Undergraduate Science Education

该项目探讨了学生如何从3D动画和/或交互式可视化中学习，旨在了解哪些设计选择在促进复杂动态事件的学习方面最有效。该研究的重点是1）更好地了解动画/交互设计选择如何影响本科分子生物学的学习，以及2）如何有效地参与和影响最直接参与生产或消费这种媒体的社区。这项工作是基于一项试点研究，探讨视觉复杂性的作用，帮助学生理解的概念，如扩散，构象变化，分子拥挤。虽然增加动画的视觉复杂性水平在传达分子世界的动态性质方面是有效的，但学生仍然难以理解分子事件的随机性质，并且倾向于将动画中显示的分子运动拟人化。智力优点：这项研究揭示了显著影响本科生对抽象分子概念理解的关键视觉和听觉变量（例如温度和分子拥挤对蛋白质构象灵活性和扩散的影响）。该项目的一个优势是，该团队包括内容专家，以确保内容的准确性和验证学生的学习成果，动画专家将结果转化为视觉材料，以及评估专家，以帮助设计工具和流程，为内容，图形设计和可视化专家提供信息。这项工作的意义是潜在的变革，因为这项研究提供了洞察可视化在学习复杂概念中所扮演的角色，并提供了广泛适用的指导方针，以帮助教育工作者和媒体设计师以最大限度地发挥其教学价值的方式设计和使用复杂的3D可视化。设计原则和可视化本身正在通过基于网络的渠道和实践研讨会相结合，广泛传播给学生，教育工作者和媒体设计师的观众。预计将在多个层面产生更广泛的影响：1）教师在课堂媒体的选择和使用方面做出更好的选择（以及在他们参与开发教育工具期间），2）设计更具教学影响力的可视化的媒体开发人员和动画师，和3）学生在适当的课堂讨论活动的帮助下成为教育媒体的更好消费者，这些活动促进了更批判性的评价该项目由生物科学理事会和本科生教育部教育和人力资源理事会共同资助，作为他们对本科生生物学教育的愿景和变革的努力的一部分。

This project explores how students learn from 3D animated and/or interactive visualizations and aims to understand which design choices are most effective in fostering learning of complex, dynamic events. The focus of the study is to 1) gain a better understanding of how animation/interactivity design choices can impact learning in undergraduate molecular biology and 2) how to effectively engage and impact the communities most directly involved in either producing or consuming this kind of media. The work is based on a pilot study that explored the role of visual complexity in helping students understand concepts such as diffusion, conformational change, and molecular crowding. Although increasing the level of visual complexity of the animations was effective in conveying the dynamic nature of the molecular world, students still had difficulty understanding the random nature of molecular events and tended to anthropomorphize the motion of molecules shown in the animations. Intellectual merit: This study is uncovering key visual and auditory variables that significantly impact undergraduate students' understanding of abstract molecular concepts (e.g. the effects of temperature and molecular crowding on protein conformational flexibility and diffusion). A strength of the project is that the team includes content experts to ensure content accuracy and to validate student learning outcomes, animation experts to translate findings into visual materials, and experts in assessment to help design the tools and processes for informing the content, graphic design and visualization experts. The implications of this work are potentially transformative in that the study offers insight into the role visualizations play in learning complex concepts, and provides broadly applicable guidelines to help both educators and media designers in the design and use of complex 3D visualizations in ways that maximize their pedagogical value.Broader impact: The design principles and the visualizations themselves are being widely disseminated to an audience of students, educators, and media designers through a combination of web-based channels and hands-on workshops. Broader impacts are expected on multiple levels: 1) instructors who make better choices in the selection and use of media in the classroom (as well as during their involvement in developing educational tools), 2) media developers and animators who design more pedagogically impactful visualizations, and 3) students who become better consumers of educational media with the aid of appropriate classroom discussion activities that promote a more critical appraisal of visualization materials.This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts toward Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.