Exploring relationships between students’ interaction and learning with a haptic virtual biomolecular model
Highlights
► A haptic virtual model simulates the specific binding between two biomolecules. ► Relationships exist between patterns of interaction with the model and learning. ► Visuohaptic coordination could offload the visual cognitive processing channel. ► Visuohaptic interactions provide access to submicroscopic biomolecular knowledge.
Introduction
Current computing technology provides humans with the opportunity to experience and interact with virtual worlds designed to depict natural phenomena. Other than perceiving information visually and verbally, modern virtual environments engage a user’s tactile sensory pathway. Haptics describes the perception of touch and force stimuli such as the texture, hardness and shape of objects (Lederman & Klatzky, 1987).
Exploitation of haptics in immersive virtual reality models holds exciting directions for education and training (e.g. Richard, Tijou, Richard, & Ferrier, 2006). Although studies investigating the role of haptics in science education are on the rise, Minogue and Jones (2006) have reported that little is known about the cognitive advantages of interacting with haptic virtual learning environments. In molecular life science education, where there is a growing emergence of such platforms in pedagogical contexts (e.g. Martin, Eid, & El Saddik, 2008), there remains a serious lack of empirical inquiry on aspects of students’ processing and learning with haptic virtual models. As part of addressing these shortfalls, we are investigating students’ interaction and learning with a biomolecular haptic virtual model developed by Bivall Persson, Cooper, Jonsson, Ynnerman, Ainsworth, and Tibell (2007), with a complementary objective of further contributing to empirically-based accounts of the cognitive merits and shortfalls of virtual reality environments for broader education contexts.
Section snippets
Students’ interaction and learning with haptic virtual models in science education
Virtual reality models that incorporate visual and haptic experiences show great promise for science education because they can stimulate knowledge-building experiences and provide novel learning settings (e.g. Richard et al., 2006). Reiner (1999) has considered students’ construction of force concepts during interaction with a virtual environment, while Dede, Salzman, Loftin, and Ash (2000) used a haptic virtual model to improve students understanding of kinematics. More recently, Wiebe,
Research aim
The purpose of the study was to explore any relationships between students’ processes of interaction with a virtual visuohaptic model of biomolecular binding and learning.
The fundamental process of specific biomolecular binding
The specific binding of one molecule to another is central to many biochemical reactions. A description of biomolecular binding is necessary to provide readers with the biological basis behind the haptic virtual system of interest to this study context. In this paper, biomolecular binding refers to a specific positioning and orientation of a ligand molecule (small molecule) into the binding site of a protein (large molecule) (e.g. Fig. 1A). The binding site is that location where the binding
Results
Findings are structured in three sections. Each successive section supplies a further level of detail consistent with the analytical direction of presenting overall relationships towards individual cases. Firstly, Section 5.1. provides an overall comparison of students’ data from the haptics and no-haptics conditions. Secondly, Section 5.2. reports the results from the PC analysis of relationships across five variables related to students’ interaction and learning with the model. Thirdly,
The role of force feedback in students’ execution of the docking task
In contrast with the no-haptics condition (e.g. Fig. 4B), haptic feedback could offer a visuotactile ‘map’ that allows for a physically realistic movement of the ligand (e.g. Fig. 4A). The tighter constellation of students’ final docked ligand positions in the haptics group (Fig. 2A) supports the channel-like docking traversal in Fig. 4A. Although such a ‘focusing’ effect may not necessarily result in a more accurate docking (Table 1), it certainly helps define potentially feasible
Conclusions
The potential benefits of the reported visuohaptic model can be summarised from an interactive, cognitive and conceptual perspective, which all have possible wider implications for the use of multimodal virtual reality systems in contemporary education and training contexts. Firstly, from an interactive viewpoint, the benefits of the virtual model with force feedback activated are that:
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Experiencing haptic feedback helps students to perform fine-tuned ligand traversals.
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Force feedback offers
Acknowledgment
The Swedish Research Council (VR Grant 2008:5077) and a postdoctoral scholarship from Linköping University supported this research. The authors acknowledge Mr. Joel Nises for programming the log file profiling tool, and are grateful to Dr. Gunnar Höst and Prof. Bengt-Harald Jonsson for valuable discussions.
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