3D Field trip

Today's field trip helped me see that technology like 3D printing is in our near future and we should be open to incorporating it into our curriculum. A curriculum that asks students to create personalized models seems much more possible after today. I still think 3D printing could be a great tool for teaching form-function relationships. I'm imagining a giving students a scenario involving an alien with a list of behaviors. Students could be asked to hypothesize the internal structural supports of the alien and draw them out. An instructor could then pick a select number of articulations to 3D print to demonstrate why they would or would not work. The Oculus Rift would also open a lot of doors in education. We had talked a little bit about using this technology to teach internal anatomy, I think this is a really powerful idea. Students have a hard time visualizing things in A&P, especially the concepts focused on small-scale physiology. I would be interested to see what this tool could do for teaching things like action potentials, capillary exchange and reflexes. I keep getting brought back to the television show "The Magic School Bus". In this cartoon series, students would board a bus that would shrink down to the size of typical molecules. The bus would travel through biologic processes and students would see things that are impossible to witness with the naked eye or even a microscope. The Oculus Rift software could recreate this interactive experience for college students. This technology could also result in physiology games that are far more innovative than any current game being used.