Learning about Genetics in Second Life

Posted on July 18, 2007 
Filed Under education, secondlife, sleducationwiki, virtualworlds

I’ve been working on our Educational Uses of Second Life wiki resource this evening - a huge task that’s only getting bigger as the fabulous examples of education in Second Life keep on coming!

Anyway, I visited a bunch of places, but tonight’s stand-out was definitely Genome Island (SLurl) .

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Developed by Professor Mary Anne Clark aka Max Chatnoir, a Professor at Texas Wesleyan University, the Island is focussed on using Second Life to teach genetics. Using the building and scripting tools in Second Life, Max has created laboratories where her students can take part in virtual experiments that produce analyzable data.

Here I am checking out the results of a experiment that was first done by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1910 on the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

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The Island is also designed as a place where students and other residents can meet and talk with professional geneticists. It includes a range of interesting areas, including:

Here I am inside the Eukaryatoic Cell, trying desperately to click on the Excytotic Versicle so I can escape! ;)

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Here I am hanging out with the mixollamas - a crazy bunch of virtual creatures that are very handy for learning about genomes and how the recombination of genetic traits determined by different pairs of alleles is a powerful mechanism for generating diversity in a population.

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One more interesting discovery - Dr. Clark also produces music based on protein sequences, which she has presented in Second Life.

If Science had been this cool when I was at school I would have paid way more attention! ;)

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