Thomas F. Weiss DUE 9455337 Massachusetts Institute of Technology FY1995 $ 150,000 Cambridge , MA 021394307 Course and Curriculum Life Sciences Title: Cellular Biophysics Software The purpose of this project is to make educational software and methodologies for its use in teaching cellular biophysics widely available. Software has been used for 10 years to teach cellular biophysics to juniors majoring in engineering and science at MIT. The software is used in lecture demonstrations, special recitation classes held in electronic classrooms, as a basis of homework assignments, and for more intensive research projects defined by students. Use of the software has greatly enhanced students' interest in and comprehension of topics in cellular biophysics. All the software has been developed by student programmers and is currently available only on UNIX workstations at MIT. The software is written in C and XWindows. In the current project undergraduates and graduate students are converting this software to run under a vendor distributed computation and visualization software package (MAT LAB) which is available on all the common computer platforms including Macintoshes, PCs running Microsoft Windows, and UNIX workstations running XWindows. The conversion allows students and instructors to more readily customize the software for their own use, and greatly facilitates software maintenance for faculty. A software textbook is being published and distributed with floppy disks of the software. The software and software textbook will be companions to a new textbook on cellular biophysics that is in preparation. The combination should provide a new set of educational materials for teaching cellular biophysics to students in engineering and science. The approach is to provide rigorous, in-depth mathematical treatments as well as the e mpirical basis of important biological, chemical, and physical principles of cell biophysics. The software together with the software text allows students and faculty to explore these principles in new ways.
