“Seeing is Believing.” Enhancing student engagement with dynamic protein‐model visualization.

Abstract

Dear Editor, We bring to the attention of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education community the 3D-model capabilities of Windows 10 that, combined with newly released features in Office 365, has the potential to enhance pedagogical methods of primary, secondary-school, and undergraduate students. The modeling capabilities built into Windows 10 provides educators a relatively simple workflow to add protein models into PowerPoint presentations, or mixed-reality classrooms, that may enhance student engagement, improving learning and retention in the classroom. The importance of engaging all students in the class is the priority of all teaching streams. A strong push for personalized teaching and increasing class sizes drives the need for restyled teaching methods, to communicate information that adapts with new modern technologies. Thus, interactive teaching techniques drive increases in student class attendance and engagement [1], while the use of this technology could enhance school-student engagement and motivation [2]. Kularbphettong et al. [3] find that by integrating augmented reality into school science subjects, student “satisfaction” was increased. This mirrors work by Parong & Mayer [4] who show that while learning is not increased, interest and motivation certainly are. This is surely a critical factor in getting youngminds to engage in the sciences while also driving their most influential factor—the teacher. While technological tools appear to be useful in teaching younger minds, attracting them further into STEM subjects, we postulate whether animations, either in 2D or 3D, are an effective tool for learning, or a distraction from the message being communicated. The debates on the use of PowerPoint in teaching are unrelenting (see [5–8]). While the general conclusion presented is one of the minor difference in cognitive learning from the use of PowerPoint, perhaps it is imperative to measure student engagement, particularly of that in younger students [9]. The use of 3D models in an interactive manner in the classroommay reduce the cognitive load of students, since it removes the need to interpret more abstract representations. Models are instantly capable of being represented in cartoon ribbon-format depicting β-sheets and α-helices as corkscrews and arrows, or as surface models to depict morphology or ligand binding sites—adding animated representation of proteins can depict these secondary structural elements more readily, aiding visual literacy and avoiding students misinterpreting protein depictions as artist-impressions [10]. These depictions may be incorporated into the Visual Blooming Tool [11] to enhance learning outcomes. There is a plethora of publications onmolecular visualization in protein education, from using rendering software such as PyMOL [12, 13] to visualization in augmented reality [14, 15]. However, the software can be complex to the uninitiated and comes without much instruction. Further, for teaching purposes, it is difficult to set primary school students “homework” or extra learning using these tools using if extra software is required for download. Thus, we arrive at the aforementioned capabilities of modern desktop office software. The February 2018 update to Office 365 (version 1802) enabled not only the import of 3Dmodels into PowerPoint, but now the inclusion of a “morph” transition between slides with similar content makes class seminars and presentations potentiallymore engagingwhen discussingmolecular cell biology and proteins. Any protein model (e.g., from rcsb.org) or molecule that can be rendered in PyMOL [16], the open-source software for proteinmodeling, can be exported as a “Virtual Reality Modeling Language” file (VRML2). Within Windows 10, the Microsoft-published “3D builder” app will export these models to a 3D manufacturing file format (.3MF) that are readily added, much like any other image or video, into PowerPoint or other Office applications. Further, in this latest version of PowerPoint, a new slide transition is available called “Morph”. Using the same object on consecutive slides, PowerPoint can smoothly transition between views of the same object, zooming or rotating to an area the teacher wishes to highlight. An example of this workflow is presented (https://youtu. be/jp6A17pVIgE). Similarly, these models can be viewed in Windows’ “Mixed Reality Viewer,” which is accessible on any modern device with a camera, ranging from laptops to virtual reality or augmented reality headsets. These models can be easily shared, stored within PowerPoint, and presented easily by students in their own presentations and reverse-learning scenarios. School students, likely with an Office subscription provided by the institution, can easily manipulate a PowerPoint file provided to them, viewing the models, perhaps with a student Volume 47, Number 3, May/June 2019, Pages 247–248 *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel.: +61883022718. E-mail: [email protected], Received 14 November 2018; Revised 11 February 2019; Accepted 6 March 2019 DOI 10.1002/bmb.21238 Published online 28 March 2019 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com)