BioGraph Project Lands NSF Funds

August 30, 2010 - MIT Associate Professor Eric Klopfer and Penn GSE Assistant Professor Susan Yoon have received a $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a unified high school biology curriculum designed to deepen students’ understanding of difficult, and often misunderstood, scientific topics such as evolution.

The project, titled BioGraph: Graphical Programming for Constructing Complex Systems Understanding in Biology, will enable students and teachers to use sophisticated graphical programming technology to build and study complex systems.

Complex systems are ubiquitous. Everything from the human nervous system to the internet to the electrical grid qualifies as a complex system. Because they are made up from a number of interacting but autonomous parts, they behave in ways that are not always predictable. But because of their pervasiveness in the natural and built environment, they are of critical importance in a wide range of fields (mathematics, statistics, engineering, computer science, biology, etc.). 

As Yoon explains, “Complex systems is a hot topic in educational research now.” But educators have struggled to incorporate the topic into the K-12 curriculum because, she continues, there is generally a lack of appropriate pedagogical strategies and tools to help teachers.

The BioGraph project addresses that challenge by providing teachers and students with a graphical programming application—StarLogo TNG—that functions much like a 3D game to help learners visualize important complex systems concepts in biology and other areas of science. Tools like StarLogo TNG may prove critical to helping increase the levels of scientific literacy among students and the population in general.

Starting in September 2010, the four-year BioGraph project will be conducted in high-needs public schools, primarily in the Boston metropolitan area. The research team will collaborate with high school biology teachers and students.

According to Yoon, “In undertaking this project, we hope to provide underserved schools with access to state-of-the-art technologies and cyberinfrastructure activities—and inspire more students to choose STEM education and careers.”

Klopfer, director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program, is the principal investigator on the BioGraph project. He will lead the team in the design, development, testing, and application of the StarLogo TNG technology and curriculum. Yoon, the co-PI, will coordinate the design of research protocols, methodologies, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination.

Yoon, who teaches in GSE's Learning Science and Technologies program, conducts research on complex systems in education, social and cognitive impacts in knowledge-building environments, and memes and memetic processes in education. Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems.

 


 

Media contact: Jill DiSanto-Haines at 215-898-4820 or jdisanto@upenn.edu