Table of Contents

• Goals
• Milestones
• Proposal (Drafted January 1997)
  • Abstract
  • Objective and Significance
  • Related Work
  • Work Completed and Lessons Learned
  • Statement of Work
  • Timeline
  • Effect on infrastructure of science and engineering, education and research
  • References
  • Personnel

Project Goals

The goal of the Virtual Creatures project is to enhance the instruction of biological and physical sciences by making full use of emerging information technologies. Using computers in the classroom with sophisticated three-dimensional modeling, visualization, simulation, and interactive capabilities, we hope to improve the way basic anatomy. physiology, and health sciences are taught to secondary school students. For more information on the goals of the Virtual Creatures Project, please refer to the teaching goals page.

Milestones

There are three distinct phases in the Virtual Creatures projects: (1) innovative educational methodology, (2) technology development and assessment, and (3) translation of methodology into useable technology into interactive and virtual laboratories.

Abstract

The Virtual Creatures research project is an interdisciplinary program to create and evaluate rich interactive learning environments in biology that are usable in classroom practice, and that push forward the envelope of learning technologies including three-dimensional visualization, model manipulation, multisensory feedback, and design-based learning. We propose to create several interactive virtual creatures, the first of a library of virtual creatures for teaching fundamental biological principles. These digital creatures will be represented so as to allow both interactive viewing and simulated physical and chemical manipulation, and will encourage students to ground abstract scientific concepts of physiology in realistic visualizations of the anatomy. They will be able to draw on mathematics, physics and biochemistry as the scientific basis for their exploration.

These learning environments will enable students to go beyond traditional learning methods such as dissection and text-based factual learning. They will use their ability to explore, visualize, touch, and change these creatures in ways that are impossible with real laboratory animals. The virtual creature will be "instrumented" to export data about student interactions. We plan to study how teachers and students use virtual creatures, what design features in virtual creatures facilitate biological learning and higher order reasoning about biological materials, and to evaluate the efficacy of these creatures among students with various learning styles.

Objective and significance

Our objective is to create a virtual biology laboratory containing a set of realistic virtual creatures, augmented with abstractions and models representing physiology, biochemistry and mechanics, to provide a rich interactive design-oriented learning and experimentation environment for middle and high school students. The actual resources built will be guided strongly by consultations with school biology teachers and students.

Many valuable educational results are expected. The students will access realistic representations of creatures such as frogs and the developing chick that they can explore in depth. These are specimens in routine use in biology classes today. They will experience multiple representations, both realistic and abstract, such as a bar-linkage-spring model of the biomechanics of frog jumping, and will learn to understand the transition back-and-forth from a complex real object to a simplified explanatory representation. The learning modules will link sciences such as physics and mathematics to the understanding of biology. We will expand our theoretical understanding of how students develop the ability to understand and use multiple representations.

The scientific significance is the creation of a virtual biology laboratory for local and Web-based access, with rich realistic creatures that can be visualized, dissected or investigated with endoscopic and other tools, as well as the availability of an array of tools to create and study abstractions that represent functions of these creatures. These abstractions will include bar-linkage models of joints and movement, compartmental models of digestion, and molecular and cellular models of biochemical and electrical processes of energy production and muscle activation. These tools and models will be based on an open architecture that can be used by other teams for additional modules.

This project requires the collaborative effort of specialists in education, biology, computer graphics, biomechanical engineering and education technology. The process of creating the multidisciplinary team and working together between disciplines will change forever the future ability of these individuals to cooperate. Further, projects such as this one will establish a benchmark of the type of research that is achievable only through such collaboration.

Related work

While we know of no work that resembles the objectives of this proposal, it is clear that we will build on the prior work of numerous groups. The closest to our work is the Whole Frog Project of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (http://www-itg.lbl.gov/vfrog). The LBNL group created a volume of cryosection images of a frog along with two-dimensional views of organs and physiological systems. The Web-accessible interactive data provided the most detailed images available of frog anatomy. However, the project does not address the transition to abstract representations or the link to system physiology. We have arranged to work with W. Johnstone of LBNL to use these data and, if necessary, to create additional high resolution slice images of frogs and other small creatures. We will also cooperate with W. Johnson of the National Research Resource in Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy at Duke University to obtain access to their high resolution (20 micron) imaging data of small animals.

Three-dimensional computer graphics and volume rendering are widely available. However, very few systems have an open architecture with available source code, that allow local addition of custom image processing. Among these are the Khoros system and the Visualization Tool Kit (Schroeder, 1996). In actual operation, users experience significant difficulty in creating models of desired anatomy because of the difficulty in automatically separating anatomic structures in the image. We will collaborate with the authors of VTK to leverage their development of image segmentation and rendering. We will add image editing tools to support the accurate segmentation of small animal anatomy.

Abstract representations of biomechanics and other function are fundamental to physiology. There are, however, no graphic tool kits that allow a student or a researcher to create easily a representation of these functions and to experiment with the representation. Certain computer games, such as The Incredible Machine, and some science educational software, provide constructive tools. However, these are proprietary systems that cannot be integrated into our virtual laboratory. We will continue to seek collaborators in this area but, meanwhile, plan to develop these tools ourselves.

The education literature is rich in studies of representation as a tool for learning and collaboration (Greeno and Shelly, 1997; Peterson, 1996). We will extend this work to investigate how students develop the ability to use, understand and create new representations and to transition between representations. To support the understanding of student use of different representations, we will use some of the content-structuring and computer-student interaction that is well-known in the field of intelligent tutoring systems (Schank. 1995)

Work completed and lessons learned during CRLT startup phase

(Oct. 96 - Sept. 97)

What we have done:

In the three months since the receipt of the CRLT grant, we have been successful in creating a team and initiating work on a number of fronts.

We have put together an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional team of:

The core team meets weekly under the leadership of the P.I. (Dev). Subgroups are formed for specific projects such as review of commercially available educational software, development and assembly of a visualization facility, methods of whole-animal biomechanical modeling, and analysis of the results of meetings with teachers and school students.

We have consulted two groups of middle and high school teachers involved in innovative life science education projects, in both wealthy and poor school districts, about their teaching of organismic biology, how they would ideally like to teach, and what features they would value for teaching with a Virtual Creature. We have interviewed independently three diverse groups of middle and high school students about computer-assisted learning about the same topics. (See the Web site http://summit.stanford.edu/creatures)

We have reviewed published educational software, e.g. ADAM and Virtual Reality Cat, searching for features that offer potential for pedagogical power greater than that of available print materials. We have also consulted published writings and expert opinion about critical learning goals in the broad area of the structure and function of organisms and about how these goals are typically pursued in schools.

We have conducted several design sessions in which we analyzed input from teachers and students, as well as stated curricular requirements and related these to the capabilities of current technology in visualization and interaction. We have developed a conceptual framework that takes advantage of detailed information about a virtual creature as well as resources that expand on the ecological niche, evolutionary diversity and relationships to human growth and fitness. We have examined existing data sets of 3D visualizations of humans and other creatures, assessing their strengths and limitations, and have begun to locate suitable software tools and input devices.

What we have learned

Through interviews with teachers and students, we have learnt that both realistic Virtual Creatures and abstractions of these creatures are necessary to the learning of biology. Students wish to view and manipulate realistic looking animals and organs, do experiments and observe virtual behavior. However, conducting these experiments and effecting behavior require abstractions of the biomechanics or the chemistry, both because of the complexity of the underlying computations, and the complexity of the explanations necessary. (http://summit.stanford.edu/creatures)

In our view the most fundamental theoretical question raised by Virtual Creatures is: How do children learn to derive meaning from the diagrams and abstract models used in science? A Virtual Creature is a literal, concrete representation of an organism which should be transparent to children, although unfamiliar. To understand how the structures so plainly visible in the Creature enable it to live, move, find and digest food, reproduce, and carry out the other essential functions of life, it will be necessary for children to use a range of more abstract representations, including schematic drawings, numerical data, and graphs, among many other possibilities. Many children have trouble using these abstract representations and relating them to the more concrete phenomena to which they refer. We propose to design the Virtual Creatures and the teaching units in such a way as to make very substantial improvements in the facility with which all children can use abstract models.

We believe we should use a constructivist, Vygotskian, theoretical orientation which suggests that children learn to use abstract models most naturally when they internalize actions they have first encountered by participating in social activities. Our units will offer children the opportunity to participate as part of small groups as well as in their larger classroom group in science activities that make use of computer-based resources containing many representations of anatomy and physiology. In addition, we will design our materials to scaffold the kinds of actions and discourse with respect to such models that are typical of scientific communities. Through video interviews with scientists, we will show how scientists use visual representations in formulating and evaluating questions and problems, making conjectures and hypotheses, searching for and using evidence, acting on conjectures and checking results, drawing conclusions and justifying them. We expect that, as children work in pairs or small groups, they will act and talk more like scientists as they use the Virtual Creature and the other, more abstract visual resources they will encounter.

Statement of Work

We will create several interactive virtual creatures which will be represented so as to allow both interactive viewing and simulated physical manipulation. The virtual creature will be "instrumented" to export data about the student's interactions. We will study how teachers and students use virtual creatures and what design features in virtual creatures facilitate biological learning and higher order reasoning. In developing teaching units with these creatures, we will follow a participatory design process. Members of the design team will supply a few cooperating teachers with prototypes of virtual creatures and related computer and other media resources so that they can teach "live" units on a theme, such as frog locomotion, on which we are planning to develop concurrently a computer-based unit. We will participate and assist the teacher as volunteer teaching aides in teaching the unit.

Virtual Creatures

* a set of realistic representations of the frog, the chick embryo (series), the human (man and woman) allowing viewing of skin, bone, muscles and organ systems;

* abstractions ranging from 3D wireframe models, through simulated radiological images to bar-linkage-spring models of biomechanics suitable for modeling locomotion; later representations will include compartmental analysis for models of digestion and gas exchange and chemical reactions for metabolism and energy use.

Instrumentation

* a set of virtual tools, in a virtual laboratory, for manipulating or representing the creatures; these may include bars and springs of various lengths and densities, rubber bands, weights, scales, rulers, calipers, forceps, pins and scalpel;

* gauges and meters to visualize quantitative information, and imaging machines to visualize organs and tissues.

Interface/viewers

* a user interface design suitable for children as young as ten years;

* 3D visualizers that allow rotation and zoom; "windows" to look through one tissue to the next or to an abstraction; "isolators" that allow selection of an organ or system

* a kinesthetic and haptic interface through a force feedback joystick to allow the sensation of tugging on muscle, sensing forces and reactions. Sample teaching units

* a total of six teaching units, each pair focusing on one of three important anatomical systems: musculo-skeletal, digestive, and cardio-respiratory.

The first of each pair will be a simple, brief but educationally powerful unit that uses the realistic virtual creature as the sole or primary teaching resource for an important educational goal. (For locomotion in the Virtual Frog, the student can view and rotate transparent overlays of muscle and bone, can "dissect" through layers to understand how muscle attaches to bone, can use "endoscopic" or "xray, MRI or ultrasound" views to see relationships, can work with related material that explains joint anatomy and sliding-rotating motion of joints. With appropriate image processing tools, the advanced student could even create their own models of musculoskeletal anatomy, and have the understanding that comes with such construction.)

The other unit of each pair will be an open-ended exploration that would take at least two weeks of class time and could be used for an entire year or more by interested students and teachers. These exploratory units will use the virtual creature as one of several computer-based and other learning resources related to the study of a central theme. These resources include abstractions such as biomechanical models, comparative information such as images and video of other frog species, molecular biology approaches such as an animation of actin-myosin interaction that explains why we can say that a contracting muscle behaves like a spring, research articles that demonstrate investigative approaches that analyze frog locomotion, a video interview with a paleontologist explaining how they analyze fossil shapes to understand biomechanical function. (We are planning an exploratory unit in which students will explore basic biomechanical principles of the musculo-skeletal system by "designing" a superior jumping frog for a jumping contest and will use many of the above resources as they plan their project.)

* in addition to the virtual frog, students will be able to use virtual labs where they can conduct computer simulated experiments on bones, muscles, and joints, studying the forces and energy created by various configurations, and experiencing these forces through interaction with a force feedback joystick. They will also be able to study video clips of actual frogs jumping and measure positions and velocities of various body parts during the jump.

Assessment instruments

* tracking of user interaction with all components of the system;

* electronically generated reports representing interaction at numerous levels - attempted and completed exercises, written notes in their lab record book describing their hypotheses, experimental designs, observations and conclusions;

* analysis of the scientific qualities of student discourse, the ways they use the virtual creature and other resources, and the problems they encounter.

Timeline

(Assume we enter Year 1 with a realistic Virtual Frog, with 3D visualizers for volume data and surface models, tools and interface to model a biomechanics design laboratory, 1-3 additional computer-based teaching resources, and two draft teaching units.)

X        X

X        X

X        X

     X 

     X 

     X 

     X 

Effect on infrastructure of science and engineering education and research

Three research assistants, a postdoctoral researcher and a research associate are key to the proposed activities. They will be guided by three senior researchers (PI and co-PIs). The multidisciplinary team will forge collaborations that have been difficult to create in scientific research. Collaboration will also extend into the school community. The Web will allow the biology community at large to contribute and comment. The product of the research, educational content and tools as well as an educational methodology for middle and high schools, will impact significantly the way biology and other sciences are taught in the partner schools. In summary, the proposed research process, as well as the product of the research, will impact significantly the infrastructure of our education and research.

References

Articles/books:

Greeno, James G. and Shelly V. Goldman (eds.) 1997. Thinking Practices: Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Peterson, Donald (ed.). 1996. Forms of Representation. NY:Intellect.

Schenk, Roger C. 1995. Engines for Education. L. Erlbaum Assoc.

Schroeder, Will, Martin, Ken and Lorenson, Bill. 1995. Visualization Toolkit: NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Web sites:

Virtual Creatures web site, http://summit.stanford.edu/creatures Virtual Frog Dissection web site, http://www-itg.lbl.gov/vfrog

Software: A.D.A.M. The Inside Story (CD-ROM). 1997. A.D.A.M. Software, Inc. Virtual Reality: Cat (CD-ROM). 1995, Dorling-Kindersley.

Personnel

Principal Investigator: P. Dev

Research investigators: D. Walker, W.L.Heinrichs, R. Pichumani

Post-doctoral student: G.Erickson

Student research assistants: W.Lorie, C.Karadi, TBD Biomechanics, TBD Anatomy

Programming/design support: R.Mather

Admin assistant: J.Schlegel

Consultants: Education, biology

©1997 Summit, Stanford University

Partial funding by NSF Grant number CDA 9616441