Creating Computer Animations of Biological Concepts

OF the many ways of learning, interpretingvisual information is a major means of acquir-ing understanding. As such, an integral part of teaching is displaying information for the students to see. The most common means of doing this are by writing on a blackboard, using an overhead projec-tor, and showing slides. These methods are good for displaying static forms of information (e.g. lists or outlines, graphs, numbers, drawings of structures, etc.) but are often inadequate to convey movement or changes over time. For example, a drawing on a blackboard may be fine for describing the structure of a gene, but students may get lost during a descrip-tion of how RNA polymerase interacts with DNA to produce an RNA transcript. A medium like videotape is more applicable to dynamic processes (Winkle 1996). However, students