IMSC Juices Up High School Biology With BioSIGHT

In an age marked by breathtaking scientific advances, how can high school science be so dull?

"Today's students with an early interest in science often encounter a dull learning experience that can severely impair their motivation for future scientific inquiry," said Wee Ling Wong, biomedical investigator at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC). Wong and her IMSC colleagues are juicing up high school science education with spectacular interactive multimedia technology in a project dubbed BioSIGHT.

"BioSIGHT will transform the high school biology curriculum by delivering in real time high-quality interactive visualization software modules through Internet connections to low-cost consumer-level computers that are becoming the norm in classrooms today," said Chrysostomos "Max" Nikias, director of IMSC. "IMSC's long-term vision of BioSIGHT is that all high school kids in the U.S. will be learning biology and performing laboratory simulations through modules with the USC/IMSC/NSF label."

A biologist and an information technology scientist, Wong said she sympathizes with students who have to suffer through biology courses that stress memorization and struggle to express important concepts in thick textbooks.

"Biology students have trouble understanding fundamental cellular and molecular processes because they lack the visualization cues. Spatial information is difficult to convey with two-dimensional images and drawings," she said.

She points out that most of today's high school students grew up playing imaginative, interactive and visually stimulating video games, so that a teacher with only a blackboard and chalk is ill-equipped. However, the same technology that makes video games so engaging will work with chemical processes or biological concepts, Wong said. One of the first modules the team created is an interactive "virtual microscope." With a computer mouse, a student controls a virtual microscope peering into a cell nucleus. He or she chooses a level of magnification and must focus the microscope. As magnification increases, the student sees more detail of the nucleus. It is even possible to "break" the virtual sample slide - a common occurrence in real biology labs - in which case, the student must mount a new slide. In another module, students pick up blood samples in a pipette, transfer them to test tube and perform a DNA test. In another module, students travel through a virtual cell, and yet another employs a puzzle that resembles the video game Tetris to explore protein synthesis. As the students solve the puzzle, they learn the decoding mechanism controlling protein synthesis.

BioSIGHT's audio, video, three-dimensional animation and graphics are more than video game flash: The technology will change the role of teachers and the way they teach science courses. Students won't just study concepts, they will manipulate objects and processes, change perspectives and solve problems.

Creating the multimedia material requires time-consuming, painstaking efforts from a scientific illustrator, scientists and education researchers, but new IMSC technology provides some shortcuts. One of the keys allowing students and teachers to interact with an animation is "model-free rendering," a technology under development at IMSC. A student exploring the interior of a cell might want to perform a "walk-through" in any direction. Model-free rendering generates three-dimensional views from a few existing two-dimensional images, eliminating the need for having stored versions of all possible views of the insides of the cell, which in turn greatly reduces the computational capacity required.

In fact, BioSIGHT is being designed to run on a minimal computer platform that will soon be common in schools. The multimedia images and animation will be sent to computers through the Internet from a powerful IMSC server.

"IMSC is developing novel methods of image and video compression that combine cues from human perception to eliminate the artifacts associated with typical compression techniques," Wong said. "We can deliver high-quality still images and video over the Web through slow network connections."

IMSC is also creating new technology to manage multimedia information that involves indexing of image, video and audio databases so that users can automatically and quickly retrieve the specific chunk of information they want.