The Biological Sciences Department at Contra Costa College seeks to provide our students with computerized recording and analyzing instrumentation for use in the laboratories of Physiology, Zoology, Botany, Microbiology, and General Biology. this instrumentation will expand and enhance the educational process for our students, many of whom are minorities and women and are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. These instruments will provide students with the ability to measure several biological functions (e.g. heart sounds, pulse, and EKG) simultaneously, and to store this data for analysis, manipulation, and graphing. This will enable the department to cease using live animals for experimentation, and substitute non-invasive techniques on human subjects. This will prove more relevant and interesting to many students, especially those in pre-clinical programs. The requested instruments replace very old physiographs and transducers used in traditional muscle experiments and allow new labs on, for example intracellular membrane potentials, respiration (where volumes are coordinated with rate), circulation (heart sounds, pulse, blood pressure, and EKG) EMG measurements on skeletal muscle, and students on locomotion. Additionally, computer analysis and graphing of data will become routine in all of the department's courses. The computers and hardware/software will be portable and will be employed throughout the department's laboratory courses, serving approximately 1,100 students per year. Experiments using this instrumentation will be published in course laboratory manuals and will be provided to the MacLab manual and to teaching societies such as Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS).
