Associate Professor The College of New Jersey Ewing, New Jersey, United States
Introduction: A comprehensive understanding of how nerve cells (neurons) work is often elusive to high school students due to the limited inclusion of neuroscience in standard educational curricula. The primary objective of this research project is to design and develop a user-friendly computational tool for high school students, providing a hands-on learning experience in neuroscience and electrophysiology. Action potentials are electrical impulses that travel down a neuron in response to a stimulus. These are critical for transferring information in the nervous system. Such natural phenomena can be simulated using differential equations. The Hodgkin-Huxley model is a series of differential equations that can be used in computational modeling to simulate neuron action potentials. When using these equations, it is possible to determine the probability of a neuron firing, its threshold voltage, and the frequency of a neuron firing. There is a scarcity of tools that can simulate action potentials as an earlier introduction of neuroscience education in schools. Therefore, it is hypothesized that a computational model or simulation that utilizes the Hodgkin-Huxley model to simulate action potentials with a lesson plan may be instrumental to improving general conceptualization and understanding of neuroscience in high school student populations.
Materials and
Methods: We created an application in MATLAB’s app designer that featured an interactive graphic user interface (GUI), allowing users to manipulate simulation parameters (figure 1). The differential equations describing the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron model were numerically solved using the ODE15 solver, foregoing the need for users to learn complex college-level mathematics or code structures. The data yielded from the solver was then graphed in the GUI (figure 1). The graphs describe the voltage of a neuron at a given time, the probability of neurons firing, and the probability of sodium and potassium channels opening. These allow the users to clearly see whether a neuron will have an action potential with the voltage graph and what factors (gating variables/channel conductance graphs) allow or prevent the action potential. An accompanying lesson plan was then created using a PowerPoint presentation that could be used to teach high school students about basic neurobiology and also serve as a tutorial for the MATLAB simulation that was created. To assess the effectiveness of the simulation and lesson plan, a survey was created that tested the student’s aptitude and understanding of the lesson and then asked for feedback.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: The initial lesson plan and simulation were tested on two rising 11th graders. After presenting the presentation and giving the simulation, both subjects were asked to complete the survey that tested their aptitude and asked for feedback. Subject 1 completed the survey but only scored a 4/11 and subject 2 completed the survey but scored a 10/11. Both subjects reported an increase in understanding of neurobiology. However, they described the presentation and survey as lacking some clarity and believed their scores/understanding may have been higher if there was better word choice in the lesson plan and survey. The initial trials have been positive, with both subjects reporting that the lesson plan and simulation have increased their understanding of neurobiology. However, the subjects reported that the lesson plan and survey were unclear. While the simulation was beneficial, it fell short of expectations due to minor unclarities within the lesson plan and survey. To enhance the simulation’s effectiveness to meet or exceed previous expectations, the survey and the lesson plan will be modified for clarity and the survey will be given both before and after the lesson to better quantify the subjects’ increase in understanding of neurobiology. Additionally, in the future more trials will take place utilizing a larger sample size in order to yield more significant results that can accurately predict student response to the simulation. In this way the simulation can better fulfill its role in increasing neurobiology understanding and decrease the scarcity in education tools that teach neurobiology. The trials demonstrated that the simulation was effective in improving the understanding of neurobiology. However, these results should be further validated with a larger sample size. The lack of clarity reported in the lesson plan and survey advises room for improvement in the future trials. With some modifications to the presentation and survey, and the utilization of a larger sample size, the increase in neurobiology understanding may be greater than initially anticipated and could be beneficial to high school educators in teaching neurobiology.
Acknowledgements (Optional): We would like to thank The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience (MUSE), and TCNJ school of Engineering.
