Newswise — Robert Pennock is going to use a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to give students what he calls an "ah ha!" moment.
An associate professor in Michigan State University's Lyman Briggs School of Science, Pennock will use the NSF grant of more than $255,000 to take a computer program that speeds up the process of evolution and turn it into a teaching tool.
The existing software uses digital organisms that are similar to computer viruses in that they have their own code and can self-replicate. However, they are also like biological organisms in that they can mutate and vary.
"Then what you do is place these 'organisms' in a digital environment and let them self-replicate, let them randomly mutate, and let them be naturally selected " the exact process that Darwin discovered," Pennock said. "Essentially you have evolution happening that you can observe."
Not only will this be a powerful tool in teaching about evolution, it will help improve students' knowledge of the scientific process, said Pennock.
"This will be used in classrooms to teach not just evolutionary concepts but also the nature of science," he said. "Students will learn how one designs an experiment, and how one can get evidence for evolutionary hypotheses that they might have thought would be impossible to confirm."
Richard Lenski, an MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of microbial ecology, already has used digital organisms to model and test evolutionary hypotheses. He and Charles Ofria, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering who developed the original digital evolution research software, are both part of the current project, as is Diane Ebert-May, of the Division of Math and Science Education, who will oversee a formal study to assess student learning using the tool that is developed.
One of the challenges Pennock and his colleagues face is how to get students to visualize the digital organisms and how they are evolving. "They aren't growing an arm or a head," Pennock said, "Instead, they are growing code which allows them to do various tasks they couldn't do before.
"Our challenge is to take make an abstract concept concrete " put an interface on it and make it visually intuitive so students can see that these organisms are mutating and evolving independently" he said. "The payoff comes when they can observe an evolved organism that can do something new that they know the ancestor they started with couldn't do, and they can see for themselves how it evolved on its own."
Now in the first year of a three-year project, Pennock and his team are currently working on the initial interface, design development, and model lesson plans. In the second year they will test the program in Lyman Briggs classes before being disseminated nationally in the third year.
Initially the materials will be developed for college undergraduates, but Pennock expects to eventually simplify it for use in high schools.
"We're hoping students will have an 'ah ha' moment as they experiment with these digital organisms," he said. "They'll say 'hey, evolution really works.'"
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