Hello Evoldir, I sent out a message requesting feedback on whether animations/simulations were useful for teaching population genetics / evolutionary theory (pasted below). I've received over 30 responses so far, all of which suggested that these teaching aids would be very useful along with the traditional teaching of mathematical and verbal concepts. A few people commented that deterministic processes are often more easily understood than stochastic processes, so perhaps effort should focus there. One person noted that unless animations/simulations were directed at the sources of student misconceptions, they would be unlikely to help much, but that if this was the case, they could be useful. In general, there was lots of enthusiasm and some very useful comments and suggestions. I have included copies of the responses that pointed out existing tools and have included the contact information of the respondent when they were directly associated with the development of a publicly available tool. Many thanks to all who took the time to respond. Sam Yeaman Department of Zoology University of British Columbia yeaman@zoology.ubc.ca ORIGINAL MESSAGE: Hi all, I am wondering whether there is general interest among the teaching community in alternative tools to teach population genetics and evolutionary theory? It seems that many of the ideas that we strive to explain are very intuitive but many students have difficulty getting past the math and jargon. I have been thinking that Flash animations and user friendly GUI's for some of the emerging evolution simulation programs would be a good complement, but before deciding whether to commit time to this endeavour, I thought I would see whether my feelings were more widely shared. I would greatly appreciate any comments or ideas you have, Sincerely, Sam Yeaman ############# Check out www.bio-doc.org. This is a collection of animations/simulations and other digital media that can contribute to teaching general biology. It is searchable, by keyword or by topic. For instance, under evolution we have 15 items that we found online: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~jeac002/index.php?rm=search&txtUnit=Evolution&txtTopic=0&txtSearch If you send a follow-up post to evoldir listing responses to your request, I'd appreciate your telling colleagues about this service, and suggest that if anyone has suitable media, to submit it for inclusion to bio-doc. Dr. Daniel I. Bolnick Assistant Professor Section of Integrative Biology One University Station C0930 University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 512-471-2824 fax 512-471-3878 danbolnick@mail.utexas.edu ########### Alan Lemmon has a website for some such simulations. http://www.evotutor.org/ ########### I saw your Evoldir posting and wanted to share some thoughts. First off, I find that simulations are an absolutely indispensable tool for teaching abstract concepts in population genetics and molecular evolution. Maybe the concepts are not really intuitive at all, that is why all of us spent many years studying to reach the point where they are intuitive to us. Having students truly grasp the ideas of dynamic processes such as drift and selection requires getting students to use teaching tools that are themselves dynamic and also interactive. My solution was to write a book, Population Genetics, published by Wiley-Blackwell that will be available this winter. The book is structured around numerous "Interact boxes" that guide students through interactive simulations to teach individual concepts. I also co-authored a package of simulation programs that teach fundamental population genetics concepts. The software is called PopGene.S^2 (popgenes-squared). More details on the book can be found at my own web page at http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/hamiltm1/Text_book.html. The simulations will soon be available from http://www.genedrift.org/popgenes.php. I also have used the "Spreadsheet exercises in ecology and evolution" book by Donovan and Weldon for some labs. I find the book a good resource and I have also designed other Excel simulation. One danger is that the students sometimes get too focused on Excel and can miss the bigger biological points. The Populus package by Don Alstad et al. is also very useful for some evolution and genetics concepts and lots of ecology concepts. There are actually some useful programs and animations out there. However, they vary a lot in quality and interface. I would certainly encourage you to think about new simulations and animations to help teach fundamental concepts. It takes a lot of work to make new simulations but it usually reaps big benefits for your students. Good luck! Matt Matthew B. Hamilton, PhD Associate Professor Georgetown University Department of Biology, Reiss 406 37th and O Streets NW Washington, DC 20057 202-687-5924 (office) 202-687-5662 (fax) http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/hamiltm1/ ########### I think it's a great idea. There are lots of drift simulators out there, but I haven't seen much beyond that that I thought was particularly successful. As an exception, you might want to look at the simple but effective use of animation in Sean Carroll's lecture on evolution of dark coat color in rock pocket mice. HHMI did an instructional video on evolution that's of unusually high quality, and got Sean Carroll and David Kingsley to do lectures on it. This excerpt is one of the best demos I've seen of a mutation arising and spreading in a population: brief, clear, and involving actual numbers, which makes the whole thing a lot less hand-wavy than usual. To see it, go here: http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/evolution/lectures.html Click the picture for "Display Option 1: Indexed Video with Synchronized Slides" and when it loads in a separate window, scroll down to "Evolution in action: The rock pocket mouse" and click it. I showed that clip to my students last night, in fact, and it was well-received. Also, to see what else is out there already, you may want to look at the list of web resources for teaching evolution that I compiled here: http://sarahstockwell.wordpress.com/teaching/ The PBS website might be especially useful. I'd offer one additional thought: A lot of the simulations I've seen don't require the student to do much besides set some dials and watch. The tricky thing seems to be to involve the student in a way that makes them think about what they're doing at each step, instead of just pushing buttons. ---------------------------------- Sarah Stockwell Ph.D. candidate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 227 Biotechnology Bldg., Clark lab Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14850 srs56@cornell.edu, (607) 255-1707 ---------------------------------- ########### Sounds like a great idea! I teach 3rd year and master courses in evolutionary biology and evo-devo and would LOVE to have intuitive animations to show the students. For the 3rd year course we use Freeman and Herron's book and have the students doing their simulations after class (http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_freeman_evol_3/12/3315/848837.cw/index.html). Those work really well. ########### I'm wondering if you know about the simulations which I did for teaching genetics and some related topics. In my experience, students have a lot more trouble understanding random processes than they have with deterministic processes. So a fair amount of my effort has gone in that direction. E.g. The Mitochondrial Eve Who will she be? http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/mit-eve.html with some discussion of the pedagogy at http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/mit-eve-disc.html Inbreeding at One Locus - Full Sib Lines http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/inbfs.html A more general statistical treatment of randomness is Normal Distribution Sampling Exercise http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/samphistn.html Some notes about it are at http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/samphistn-disc.html Note: this is one that I made accessible to the visually impaired community. Click the "D" link to learn more. Also I blogged about this extensively at my Educause blog (my id there is hes8). Another example is not so much a simulation as a presentation which allows the students to analyze an experiment without doing an unreasonable amount of work. Stubble Bristle (or other recessive lethal) Exercise for Dr. M. B. Gardner's GN 412 Course Watch the changes in phenotype and gene frequencies http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/gn412/select-sb.html Feel free to run it - put in a value such as -0.2 for h in the box, and click the Plot values button. When I first implemented this, I thought that the resulting "ascii graphics" were fine - but a substantial fraction of the students just couldn't "see" the curves. That was solved with the Get Good Quality Graph button further down the page. More comments are at: Selection against a recessive lethal (Sb) http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/select-sb-disc.html If you're interested, let me know. I have other "learning objects." Henry Schaffer hes@unity.ncsu.edu ########### I am currently teaching an undergrad evolution/popgen course and use a small program called "PopG" written by Joe Felsenstein fairly extensively in it. The program simulates allele frequencies in one or more populations under drift, selection, mutation and migration. It is simple but pretty effective; my students responded particularly well to its use in showing how increasing gene flow starts making populations evolve in a concerted fashion. It can be found at: http://evolution.gs.washington.edu/popgen/popg.html I assign one homework each term that requires students to run it themselves; it will run on nearly anything (windows, linux, mac) and is free. I would love to use McClade to do similar things for phylogenetics, if it were more readily available. Sam Yeaman