Animating and Visualizing Complex Physiological Steps

Do you know how our muscles work?  

We often take for granted how much it really takes to get our muscles to move the way they do.  I am personally amazed how we're able to respond to stimuli in a fraction of a second.  There are so many steps required to get a single muscle fiber to contract, let alone all the fibers working together.  And those fibers working together pull on tendons, which pull on bones, which then elicit the movement.  There's a lot going on.

We're wrapping up our unit on the muscular system in my Anatomy and Physiology Classes.  The last two weeks student groups were tasked with creating either a non-verbal skit, video, or animation to illustrate the complex steps of muscle contraction. For the most part, this was a homework assignment, but they were given some time in class to collaborate and plan.

I'm really impressed with how they came out.  Below are some of the videos that help illustrate those steps of muscle contraction occurring in a single muscle fiber.  They had to first illustrate the movement requiring the contraction, and then "zoom in" to the cellular/molecular level.

This one is too big to upload to the blog. Click on the link to view/download.  It's worth watching.

https://drive.google.com/a/lgsuhsd.org/file/d/0B_HzqNZ0s41LNnRab1VhRVJqMTA/view

You can see there's clearly a variety of methods.  One group drew everything, filmed with a camera, and then used Windows movie maker, or something else, to speed it up.  Some didn't speed it up, and just played in real time.  Another group used an iOS app called "iMotion" to create the stop motion steps after drawing on white boards.  Others did splicing of pictures with text.  One group made a .gif from the images.

While not all are perfect, all did demonstrate the steps required for muscle contraction.  Hopefully the act of making them, and then being able to watch them, helped students have a better understanding of the many steps of muscle contraction.

Why is this type of assignment useful?

While I love technology, I do not love technology for the sake of technology (mostly).  For me, if I'm going to assign a multi-media project, I want to it do something that couldn't be done without the technology, and I want students to be gaining skills along the way.  I think the "SAMR Model" is useful for determining what I'm getting out of the technology.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/souvenirsofcanada/16365262131/

Licensed for noncommercial reuse

The steps of muscle contraction are super complicated and difficult to visualize since it's occurring at the cellular and molecular level.  Without technology, the best I could have them do is draw it or act it out in person, but by adding the technology we're able to shift from the enhancement up into transformational categories of modification and redefinition.  The ability for a student to create a video that is posted on YouTube, where other students can watch and learn from watching, is transformational.  

Do you have any ways this kind of assignment could be made better?  Can it be more transformational?  I'd love to hear some ideas.  Also, if you want a copy of the activity we did, let me know. I'd be happy to share it.

Time-Lapse as a formative tool

GI love project based learning.  Nothing gives me more bang for my buck in terms of content and skills that students acquire through collaborating and creating something as part of group.  It's the 4 C's: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity.  Check out the  ISTE standards for more specifics.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c5/50/41/c550417f3e21123c7dc8404c99f5b89c.jpg Used under Fair Use/Creative Commons.

The one thing about group work is it's messy.  Kids don't necessarily know how to work in groups appropriately.  While we as teachers can assign roles for each, and scaffold all we want, ultimately it's up to to them to learn how to do it through a little bit of trial and error. What's more, it's often unfair.  Especially for the untrained or unaccustomed student of group work, I find most students shuffle into roughly three types of students during group work in the beginning.

1. The collaborative group member: He/she shares work proportionally with group mates.  They communicate effectively.  Is self directed and stays mostly on task.   They're not the "perfect" group member, they just do their work.
2. Dominant leader:  He/she likes to be in control of the group.  They often do more than their fair share, sometimes going so far as to intimidate others from working.
3. Spectator Lab Partner: This person loves to watch others work, but don't do much, if anything, themselves. Sometimes they like to look like they're working, but they're not.

Today was day 3 of a short term project.  By today everyone should know what to do, have divided up work, and be working on it.  But, I had one group that had basically one collaborative group member, and 3 spectators.  Even though I had prompted them to all get to work, the same three continued to do their observational study.

I've been experimenting with the time-lapse feature of the camera in the latest iOS 8 by filming my daughter as she colors or paints.  It's a pretty cool feature.  It essentially takes a picture every 10 seconds, and then when you're done recording, it plays all the images in sequential order.  It's pretty simple, and easy to do. Just spin the "dial"to time-lapse and push the red button.

Here's a quick picture I took of what it looks in the app itself.

Here's an example of what it can look like, courtesy of my daughter's artwork.

I had an idea today to set up my iPad on a time lapse while students did work. One class I set up the iPad targeted directly on the group and then let it go and said nothing.  Fifteen minutes later, and after stepping out of the room for a few minutes to check on students working outside, I stopped the time-lapse and went and sat down at the group.

"I love technology...." I started.

"Wait, you filmed us?" blurted one student as he saw me go the camera roll of the iPad.

"That's right. I took a time-lapse of you guys working.  Now let's think about this, if this camera takes a picture every ten seconds, and a student is working throughout, what should we see?"

"They shouldn't move."

"Exactly." I say, ready to make my point.  "Let's see what we see from this group.  I have a hypothesis that Elizabeth won't move, but everyone else will."

I start the video, and sure enough one student hardly moves, and is writing through most of the time. A second doesn't move, but does a fair amount of talking.  One is sitting on the desk, doing nothing except to get up once to twirl the meter stick for a good minute.  The third is the one everyone gathered around to watch and laugh at.  He's never in the same place for more two consecutive frames. He's constantly moving around, bobbing in and out, and clearly not working. At one point he disappears for a while as he left to go talk to another group, and then he shows up in the frame visiting with another group.

Nothing says busted, like video proof.  While we all had a good laugh about it, the students got the point.  I didn't really need to say much.  When I walked away, all four sat down and started working, and worked much better.

My take-aways from today
Formative assessment is often more important for students than teachers.  And the quicker the feedback from that assessment, the quicker one can make an adjustment.  Our own mobile devices give another tool for us to give that feedback quickly.

While a picture may speak a thousand words, a video (or even a rapid fire series of pictures), can say just as much or more. As teachers were often the sole person giving feedback in the classroom, and I think sometimes students inadvertently tune us out like they do their parents even if what they say is right or important.  It's nice to let a video speak for you. 

Formative assessment isn't just for content.  It's needed for developing skills too.  Students need feedback, in real time, on their interactions with peers in collaborative settings.  This was a big a-ha for me today, and one that I think I'll explore in the future.


I'd love to share the video I recorded, but I'd have to get parent permission for all of the kids in the clip.

The Hunger Games

This is my first non-genius hour post to the blog.  Friday I did one of my favorite labs of the year with my biology classes.  It's a lab that came to me as an epiphany during my student teaching, and has been refined each year to become a solid lab covering many types of concepts.   I now call it The Hunger Games Lab.  I've included a link to  the lab at the bottom of this post.  Here's the explanation of how it works:

The basic format starts with the class broken into three groups, or phenotypes, which we record the number of before we begin.  They are the "stumpy" (genotype AA) who pick up their cork "food" with their wrists,

 "knucklers (Aa) who pick up food with the gap between their index and middle finger knuckles,

and "pinchers" (aa) who pick up their food with their thumb and index fingers.   

We go outside, make a big circle, and I spread ~100 corks on the ground and say "go!"  

They have to run and get as much food as possible using their feeding style.  A colleague tried my lab this year a made a modification that I loved and tried with my class myself.  Each student was given a container to serve as their "nest" or "den" that they had to bring their food back to.

Once all food is exhausted, I tell them how many corks they needed to survive.  Usually I choose enough to kill off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the population.  They return the corks to me, the dead individuals leave the population, and the winners are told to find a mate to reproduce with that will give them offspring most likely to survive.  Typically this means everyone wants to mate with a pincher primarily, and a knuckle secondarily.  Stumpys don't usually get much love.

Earlier in the year we do a "coin sex" lab where we explore probabilities of offspring inheriting alleles from various different genotypes of parents.  I build on this experience with the Hunger Games Lab.  A student who is a stumpy (AA) will label a coin with tape "A" on each side.  A knuckler would have "A" on one side and "a" on the other.  And a pincher would be "a" on both sides.  Each side of the coin represents each homologous chromosome with the gene of interest.  When students pair up with their mate, they both flip their coin. This simulate meiosis and Mendel's laws of segregation and independent assortment.  The resulting allele face up is the one passed on in their gamete.  When students pair their coins together, they simulate recombination, or sex, to determine their offspring's genotype and phenotype.  For a lot of students, this lab is a big "a-ha" moment about meiosis and sex, and haploid and diploid.

Remember those dead individuals? Well now they are reincarnated as the offspring.  A kid who died as a stumpy may come back as pincher (this is why all kids need to have three coins).  Then the most important part: we count the number of each phenotype.   We then circle back up and the process repeats.  I have on my data table 10 generations worth, but we typically do 5-6.

The next lab day we calculate the allele frequency each generation to track the evolution of the population.  We also have a lot of great conversations about behaviors we saw during the lab and how it's like real life.  I love the conversations we have about this part.

Real Life Context

There are so many real life applications that can be discussed from this lab. Here's an incomplete list of things that come up and some discussion questions I usually raise.

1. Kids always cheat.  Nevertheless, the population always evolves to be more like the pinchers with "a" allele increasing in frequency.  What is cheating? Why do we cheat? Do organisms cheat in real life?
2. Sometimes Stumpys cooperate into a herd, and preserve their genotype.  This brings up topics like group selection, disruptive selection, and speciation.
3. The whole population shifts towards the pinchers.  This helps us understand directional selection and gradualism.  A common thing is see is that students always thing recessive alleles are bad.  Here they realize that recessive alleles can actually be good, and thus increase in the population.
4. Populations, not individuals, evolve.  Most kids get this rock solid by the end of the lab.  They also begin to understand how natural selection acts on the phenotype, but it's the genotype that evolves.
5. Certain kids are sometimes popular as mates.  Sometimes certain kids are monogamous.  This brings us interesting topics of discussion about mate choice and sexual selection, and how that can influence the population.
6. Bottlenecks. Sometimes I kill off a lot of the population.  There's usually a point at which I dump all the food in one pile, and everyone sprints to the center (Hence the name "Hunger Games").  Some kids give up and die off.  In this way it's less about the phenotypes and more about who was lucky enough to get to the pile.  This can help students understand genetic drift and how sudden changes in the environment can affect a population.
7. This year after I adopted the "nests" component, some students raided each other's nests at the end of the last round.  This brought up a great conversation about parasitism.  This reminded us how new behaviors, if advantageous, can be heavily rewarded in a population and can act as driving force in reproductive isolation and speciation.  We talked about Cuckoos' nest parasitism and a neat recent article about Scrub Jays on Santa Cruz Island.  There are a lot of parasites one could discuss.

Feel free to use and modify the lab to fit your needs.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.  If you make any great modifications or find cool new patterns, PLEASE share in the comments below.  I'd love to hear more, or hear how people are benefiting from my work.  If you have any questions, I'm happy to clarify too!

Hunger Games Lab

Student Blogs!

Here is the list of my Anatomy and Physiology students' projects I posted previously, but now with links to their individual blogs.

Please check them out and give them a comment!

• Designing a lighter high top basketball shoe.  
• Creating a documentary about distracted driving.
• Raising awareness of organ donation and promoting a way of increasing the number of donors.
• Comparing and contrasting different approaches to autism therapy and raising awareness and money for treatment.
• Creating a visual novel centered on emotional intelligence and brain science.
• Getting solar power established at SHS.
• Creating a visual portfolio of styles through the 20th century
• Creating a human body board game (like Clue) where players have to determine the system, and disease, afflicting a patient.
• Writing a business plan.
• Creating, preparing, and discussing the nutritional benefits of various meals and then creating a cookbook based on their blog.
• Creating a removable device that will address damage to clothes caused by autistic kids who chew on their clothing.
• Designing a method for increasing bone density.
• Creating a plan to help those who are diagnosed as pre-diabetic with changes in diet and lifestyle.
• Create an app that helps people choose where they should travel based on various criteria.
• Creating a targeted meal plan for sport specific athletes.
• Creating a light that utilizes salt water.
• Designing a genetically modified algae to help produce oxygen.
• Creating an app for cancer patients to help manage schedules, medications, and biometrics as well as create a social network for those with similar conditions.
• Studying and understanding online behavior when given anonymity compared to real identity.
• Creating video series highlighting pillars of health and how to promote a healthy lifestyle.
• Create a book on California native plants that highlight natural history, potential health benefits, and how to use them in home landscaping.
• Volunteering in a retirement home and creating an oral history of those who live there.
• Creating a fitness plan to test the benefits of low, moderate, and high intensity workouts.
• Game programming and design in interactive cognitive brain games

Using Feedly to Monitor Student Blogs

Students have created their blogs, and have begun posting.  The plan is for them to post to them every other week, and provide comments on each other's blogs during non posting weeks.    Our school uses a learning management system called Canvas as an intranet of sorts for teacher pages, homework posting, online discussion boards, and submitting assignments (among other things). I used this system for them to submit their blog urls.  Another way would have been to create a Google Form that they could go to and paste in their urls, which in turn would give me a spreadsheet with all of their urls organized neatly by name.  I actually think I might just do that next year.  

From my end as a reader though, I don't really want to go to Canvas every time I want to link to their blogs, or see if they've posted recently.  I want to go to one single place.  That's where Feedly comes in:

Feedly is basically and RSS reader that conglomerates all of the most recent posts of website you view on a regular basis.  Why waste time going to each and every one of your favorite websites to see what's new, when you can go to one place and see all of the new posts organized however you choose?  It's easy to set up. Once you create an account, you can easily access new posts by logging in via the Feedly website, or by using the Feedly mobile or desktop app.  Once in, you can see which websites have had recent posts, and link directly to them, or just read the content in Feedly and quickly move on to the next. It's really handy.

Here you can see that I connected all of my student blogs into my own Feedly.  The numbers on the right of the left hand column indicate the number of unread posts.

At first glance it looks like I need to talk to students about including some pictures in their posts.  Having pictures can be a nice way to pique view interest.

This is a great tool for me to see real quick who's posting and who's not.  It's also a great tool for students to use, and I plan on sharing it with them next week.  For them, they can use it to track their peers' blogs without having to go to Canvas.  What's more, they can use it to track information they're seeking for their actual projects.  20% time seems like a lot of time, but it's really not. I'm realizing how fast it goes, and you want your time finding information to be as efficient as possible.  Using Feedly, or other RSS readers, to bring the information to you is a huge time saver.