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News Release: WSU PROFESSOR ON LEADING EDGE OF USING ANIMATION TO AID STUDENT LEARNING April 6, 1998 MEDIA CONTACT: Kirsten Birkeland, 360/546-9602, birkelan@vancouver.wsu.edu VANCOUVER, Wash. -- How will students in the science classes of the future learn complicated scientific principles? Washington State University at Vancouver biochemistry professor Steve Sylvester believes the future of learning may lie in computer animations. To that end, he is attempting to create animations of the biochemical processes involved in DNA sequencing, a move which could be a significant step toward the creation of an entirely virtual textbook for college and even high school science students. The animations will help represent non-verbal concepts (his example being, "How do you pronounce CH3CH2CH3?") and help students convert two-dimensional pages into three-dimensional models. "I believe that good computer animations can overcome some learning difficulties for many students," he said. "Although much material will remain non-verbal, animations cause elaborative thinking processes that enforce memory." Sylvester has always championed the use of multimedia presentations in the classroom to enhance student understanding. Recently, he was awarded a summer fellowship grant from WSU's Center for Teaching and Learning to create the biochemical animations, and expects one complete animation to be finished by the end of the summer and to work on further animations indefinitely. The animation, expected to fill 10 Megabytes of a CD-ROM or zip disk, would be available to undergraduate organic chemistry classes and, eventually, high school students. The seeds for the idea were planted while Sylvester was an undergraduate at the University of Washington and struggling to grasp the processes his instructor was discussing. The idea germinated until 1985, when Sylvester was teaching embryology at WSU and the same idea surfaced again. Sylvester found that his students could repeat descriptions of the certain principles, but did not necessarily understand the principles themselves. To illustrate certain concepts, Sylvester convinced his department to invest in a computer program that could produce line drawings. Although impressed, Sylvester knew the animations were crude and, because students had to go to a computer lab to view them, impractical. After waiting more than a decade, the capabilities and prevalence of personal computers make it possible to produce high-quality animations that will be available as a teaching supplement for every student. The lack of quality animations, however, drove Sylvester's grant proposal. He uses multimedia and computer tutorials in his WSU Vancouver classes occasionally, but the materials have not been sufficient to become a major part of the cirriculum. WSU Vancouver provides junior, senior and graduate-level courses to more than 1,300 students on its 348-acre campus seven miles north of the Vancouver-Portland metropolitan area. |
