1. The effectiveness and enjoyment of any workshop depend upon the flexibility of the facilitator.  A facilitator should certainly be able to connect any material, especially STEM-based, to real-world contexts.  Also, the facilitator should take the time to know his/her/their audience to not only understand their perspectives, but also to incorporate them as part of the process.

2. For those who do have access to online resources and capabilities, perhaps engaging people in rounds of online "pictionary" where students and/or facilitators have to draw their own versions of molecules and compounds would be helpful to consider new ways to visualize things.  Additionally you could have people create 3-dimensional models of molecules or compounds made from household items (e.g. crude models of proteins).

The crude protein model with household items is a great idea! In our in-person workshops, we usually have an icebreaker where one person explains to another how to assemble a small Lego kit, often with some interesting results. That activity illuminates just how challenging it is to articulate an abstract idea, and gets everyone excited to start working. Having people discuss home built protein models could be a neat virtual replacement. Thanks for the note!

Dr Alkins, Thank you very much for your answers here & your questions down below! I notice that you’re a Diversity Officer at TERC. Part of my contribution to the https://BioMolViz.org team is diversity outreach so that we can broaden the pool of students and especially faculty who are aware of and using the concepts/tools that we develop. I led sessions about structural biochemistry techniques and our visualization education advice at both SACNAS and ABRCMS conferences in the past. What advice do you have about:

a) publicizing education innovations to diverse audiences?

b) incorporating DE&I in our work so that the pedagogy is culturally sensitive?

Thanks!

Hi Dr. Roca,

     Thank you for your questions.  In terms of publicizing an innovation like this to diverse audiences, I think what you are doing is certainly a good start.  How did your sessions fair in terms of garnering new users?  National conferences like SACNAS and ABRCMS can be good opportunities to grab students/new users.  At these conferences, however, students and professionals are inundated with so much other information that you may not obtain the attention you need. 

• a) If you are trying to reach students, perhaps try developing a relationship with a specific HBCU, PBI, HSI, TCU, etc. and work with their departments that may benefit the most from your innovation.  Also, when you speak to these departments you can tailor your sessions to understand the other populations that are at their institutions (e.g. neurodiverse learners, etc.).  This would certainly give you some focus group data. 

• I've also thought about this as another NSF proposal.  One of the limitations of expanding research capacity at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) is knowledge of educational technology and access.  Perhaps hosting a research institute or series of conferences that rotate among community colleges and MSIs and that trains faculty and students on novel innovations (how to use, capabilities, etc.) and grants access to these tools would improve usage and student preparation (I need to better articulate this, but hopefully you get my idea).  It brings your tool to the intended audiences and allows them an uninterrupted environment to consider how it will help their institution and students.

• b) The first thing I would do is simply look at the history of some developed STEM tools/technologies.  Examine the development process to identify shortcomings (e.g. facial-recognition software and the lack of racial/ethnic diversity in their team).  This will illustrate one facet of why having a diverse team is essential to creating any technology.  You could also examine the history of contributions from underrepresented communities to biochemistry (these are all general ways to become culturally sensitive)

• More specifically, I would encourage the recruitment of diverse perspectives from the nascent stages (focus groups) to understand what tools these communities need and what support they will need for implementation.  It can be in addition to finding developers from underrepresented backgrounds.  This grants a sense of ownership in the development process and a stronger commitment. 

     I hope this helps, and if you or anyone on the team would like to talk more, please feel free to contact me. Again, great project!

Stephen

Thanks for the kind words! I'm a member of our volunteer working group. I'm a MoBio biochemist by training but now an independent bioinformatics researcher. Please check out our BioMolViz.org website for more info and sign-up for our newsletter for more information (Contact page). Our working group are ASBMB members so I hope we'll meet-up at a future ExpBio conference where we typically report our latest results. Here's an introduction from the ASBMB Today magazine (archived version).

Please let us know how you would want us to deliver molecular visualization assessments in a convenient manner for your instruction. Our repository of curated questions is in development so we're taking user suggestions. Also, let us know if it would be helpful to have tutorials on using molecular viz software tools for educational use. We are developing an online PyMOL workshop that we are piloting this summer. We also have Chimera experts in the group and so may develop a customized tutorial for that tool as well as other educational resources, too.

Chao!

Thanks for checking out our project! 

Thanks for checking out our project! We are focused on developing tools for undergraduates, but many of the softwares we use (JMol, Chimera, PyMOL) are free, and have a reasonably simple graphical user interface. I don't think it's ever too early to introduce students to structure—the representations really wow them, and that wow factor really helps to build lifelong interest! Online tools like Protopedia can allow students to interact without even downloading a program: http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/DNA 

Another great resource is PDB-101 https://pdb101.rcsb.org/. The Molecule of the Month is a great tool to introduce the importance of structure to students in middle school and beyond.

 

Hello Sephen - thanks for the great questions. The BioMolViz group is passionate about educating educators on the importance of visual literacy. It's not a specific course, per se, but we encourage everyone to see the value of visual literacy at all levels. Aspects of visual literacy can begin early (even in elementary school) but we focus more on the undergraduate and post-graduate level. At the undergraduate level we suggest that these ideas need to be present in both intro and advanced courses. 

 

I have used the BioMolViz competencies with my students, who do create their own models when making Proteopedia pages for an upper division Biochemistry course.  It was really helpful for scoring their projects, to have a list of novice through expert skills.  Helped me keep the assignment workload reasonable, and made grading much easier.  And I could see an improvement in the students' skills as they worked on generating their own digital models.

Thanks for watching our video, Wendy! We encourage visual literacy broadly. Our assessments for *biomolecular* visual literacy are largely geared towards undergraduates, as this is where most students are exposed to using software to explore complicated submicroscopic structures. However, we have partnered with others who are interested in bringing visual literacy into secondary schools.
Your question about instructors is a really interesting one, and one we've never explored. Instructors generally report a wide variety of comfort with software - from newbies to veterans. However, I believe instructors have enough training to be able to infer or construct a close understanding of an image (or fake it :) ). Really great question!

Hi Feng, thanks for checking out our project. Currently, the goal is to build a repository of assessments that instructors can use to evaluate students' visual literacy through our workshops. We are vetting the repository questions with a team of experts, and then will evaluate student performance on the questions through a statistical model (Rasch model) to see which questions will be included in the final version of the repository. Those that plan to pilot the questions in their classrooms are self-selected from our community, so they are instructors that are already thinking about improving student visual literacy. 

At that point, we'll be able to use the vetted assessments to evaluate some of the outcomes you've touched on. That's a bit down the road, but looking at ability before and after an instructional intervention will likely be the most practical approach. Instructors that express interest in our work are somewhat self-selecting in that they want to build their visualization instruction skills and promote visual literacy, so I'm not sure about what we'd use as a control group, but it would be interesting to explore.

I've used biomolecular visualization pre- and post-tests in my own courses, and they've been incredibly informative and have guided changes in the way I teach visualization in my own course from semester to semester. I hope we will be able to provide instructors with valuable assessments that will allow them to do similar studies. Thanks for the questions! 

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Kristen. Yes, I agree that having a reliable and valid test of student visual literacy is the prerequisite to evaluate the impact of the workshops on this outcome. I also see the difficulty of including a control group during the evaluation. You might still want to explore the possibility because it would definitely increase the rigor of the study.

Thank you for considering our project Paula! Do you use Molecular Visualization in your pedagogy?

Thanks Michael!  It's amazing how little we seem to know about how our conceptions of space and different cultural frameworks of space both limit and inform how we interpret our world.  Your work is really interesting.  Some people have studied how dance set to biomolecular interactions might assist concept and visual literacy.  Just as an aside, I went to a national climate change meeting and listened to two different people talk about how they must navigate everyday through the space of the dominant culture (in this case white and male).  As someone who is mathematically inclined and into visualization at the macro and micro level, it blew me away that the space I occupy as a white male must be navigated through by so many.  How sad but at the same time it shows how extensive and how encompassing entranced isms (racism, sexism, etc) are.  Somehow thinking about it geometrically really hit me.  I digress but so much of how we perceive, learn and react are not known but your work helps illuminate it for us.  The data is there, we just need to access it.