This team at SUNY at Buffalo is developing POP!World, a cloud infrastructure-enabled comprehensive platform for experiential learning, education, training and research in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Population genetics is one of the foundations of the modern evolutionary synthesis. It enables discoveries in all areas of evolutionary study and provides tools for predicting the outcome of evolutionary events. The proposed integrated platform will support a wide range of tools from simple learning at the K-12 level up through college and on to applied research on genetic outcomes. This project will address the primary goal of the CI-TEAM solicitation ?Prepare current and future generations of scientists, engineers, and educators to design and develop as well as adopt and deploy cyber-based tools and environments for research and learning, both formal and informal?.
The major goal of POP!World is to leverage the advances in cyber-infrastructure to improve accessibility of important biological concepts to students at all levels. It is designed to empower a broad spectrum of users with access to cyber-enabled scientific resources, tools and platforms, thus, preparing the next generation of scientists. In informal settings the features of this platform will be used to inspire K-12 students and kindle their interest in STEM areas. POP!World offers a highly engaging alternative to currently prevalent textual environments that fail to captivate net-generation audiences. It is also more mathematically focused than currently available graphical interfaces, allowing it to be used as a basic teaching tool and expanded to higher education levels and collaborative research platforms. Special features of the project include a professional education and research platform for high-fidelity simulations of microevolutionary processes (e.g.: selection, mutation, migration, genetic drift, and non random mating). The tool includes interactive simulation with visually appealing displays of outcomes; status panels displaying computed and derived information from the input and simulation process, student evaluation modules, and research components for setting up hypothetical experiments.
The project is serving as a model to demonstrate the practical challenges and solutions in transforming the emerging cloud infrastructure to multi-disciplinary tool development. The tool will be universally accessible via the cloud machine images, and will run on the cloud using its computational capabilities thus not limiting the user machine. Although this project is initially using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google App Engine as cloud hosts, the tool can be easily adapted to other cloud environments. Cloud-enabling allows for easy set-up for training sessions and offers a truly scalable model for mass dissemination of POP!World. The project will be developed using open-source software and will itself be available as open-source under GNU public licensing. Cyber-savvy students will be not only the users of the POP!World but also be the creative force behind the design and implementation of the tool. We plan to develop major components of the POP!World as capstone projects for students majoring in Computer Science & Engineering and Bioinformatics.
Intellectual Merit: The project is a synergistic inter-disciplinary collaboration among investigators from Computer Science & Engineering and Biological Sciences. The PI has background in grid-computing and data-intensive computing research and education and in tool building. She has successfully implemented an NSF-supported curriculum for data-intensive computing. She is guiding the design and implementation of POP!World. The co-PIs will are using their extensive experience in population genetics, evolutionary biology, and course design to guide the theoretical and practical science aspects of the project and demonstrate POP!World?s diverse use in introductory and advanced courses of the biology curriculum. The external consultant has a unique background as an award winning community college professor and a retired program manager of a Fortune 500 company.
Broader Impact: The POP!World project showcases the impact of the emerging cloud-infrastructures on multi-disciplinary collaboration and research. It illustrates an affordable and effectively adaptable delivery mechanism (i.e. the cloud) for scientific innovations to a wide demographic, and will make the technology highly accessible to a variety of organizations. This is expected to engage a diverse population of many types of participants (students K-12, educators, researchers, adult learners, etc.). POP!World can be used as learning tool for attracting, retaining and engaging the net-generation workforce at all levels and in multiple disciplines. It is expected to have a very broad impact on improving the preparedness of our Sciences & Engineering tech-savvy workforce by supporting exciting visual interactions, experimentation involving "what if" inquiries for learning and research. Results will be disseminated widely through conferences and workshops to audiences at all levels. This all-female team of investigators with truly diverse background is deeply committed to mentoring, educating and training.
In a collaborative effort between computer scientists and biologists, we created an intuitive software tool that allows students to simulate evolutionary forces and observe the effects of microevolution in populations. Our two core goals were to improve mathematical literacy in evolutionary biology, and to provide a scalable and sustainable tool to educators of all levels, by means of cloud computing. Why math and evolution? Biology (and evolution) is still seen as a science that relies only in a minor way on quantitative methods. Alas, contemporary biology requires a rather advanced understanding of math. Unfortunately, the majority of incoming undergraduates are ill-prepared for math, which invariably leads to a great deal of frustration. Understanding the complexity behind evolution is especially challenging, and fraught with models, differential equations and derivations. As evolution is rarely suited to a traditional bench lab environment, we believe that experiments may be best demonstrated through interactive computer simulation. Students can more easily understand information and abstract concepts when they can see how they work. Built in a video game style, our application plays to the strengths of today’s generation, making use of their familiarity with highly visual technologies. Specifically, we let students model evolution in populations, introducing them along to way to the forces of microevolution, and their subsequent effects on macroevolutionary processes. Alongside the self-paced game area, we display the actual mathematical steps, so students can intuitively connect practice and evolutionary theory. Why the cloud? Two problems in today’s educational landscape are consistency of and accessibility to resources. Using the recently emerging infrastructure of cloud computing may remediate these issues. Specifically, the cloud allows an easy way to share tools, and adjust content and capacity on the fly without investing in a completely new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Effectively, anyone with access to the web, be that a high school classroom, a university computer lab, or a research facility, can use the same tool, at the same time, independent of physical location or platform. This not only facilitates a more decentralized approach to learning (i.e. students can do labs on their own schedules), but also encourages the development of modular education packages, where the same core program can be used and adjusted to different levels. We are doing just that and plan to scale this software between middle and high school audiences all the way up to a graduate student/research scientist level. Where are we at? Our team completed all goals, and developed a scalable and sustainable cloud-deployed learning environment that is publically accessible by any educator worldwide (http://popworld15.appspot.com/). All modules were developed under a public licensing agreement, and access and use will be completely free of charge. The module is being used since 2010 by 1500 + students at the undergraduate level at the University at Buffalo, as well as several other universities and some high schools (nationally). One other important aspect of our project is that use in the classroom at UB allowed us to measure learning outcomes, and assess if this learning tool actually works. Survey responses collected over 5 years indicate that students perceive the tool as helpful, and a significantly higher interest in the field of evolution is reported. Student evaluations suggest an increased performance in the population genetics modules. Results from this research have been published in the Journal of College Science Teaching, and were presented at several national conferences concerned with education and the use of technology. Life after NSF, or Where are we going with this? Building on our long-term collaboration between the Departments of Biology and Computer Science and Engineering at UB, we are continuing our project and have begun to develop and deliver population genetics teaching apps for mobile devices (phones and tablets), supported by Android and Apple operating system. We already assessed technology effectiveness, and we learned that among all mobile devices, tablets were vastly preferred over smartphones. Importantly, tablets were reported to be overwhelmingly used at home, or in the library with access to course materials, and with friends. These findings suggest crucial points to consider in the context of mobile, online education delivery outside the classroom: Not all mobile devices are equally suited, and learning environments with the capacity for interaction matter greatly, especially for higher level, conceptual learning. Based on the clearly positive role of mobile-device instruction, we recognize the need to better capitalize on the ability of tablets to serve as an interactive teaching device. Therefore, we are taking this to the next level, and are working to implement Pop!World in a multiplayer mode, with player interaction and user incentives (badges).
