NIA2 is a hit with the students in the SPINES course at the Marine Biological Laboratory

June 25, 2008 • Posted by Ann Stuart

The 18 students of the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics and Survival (SPINES) just finished a 6-day week of using NIA2 to solidify their understanding of basic neurophysiology. For me, one pleasure in teaching a course at the MBL is that there are no exams. Free of exam expectations, the students can learn at their own pace and thus enjoy the process. Nor are there competing pressures on the students. They do not have to "get done" so as to be somewhere else.

As we heard last year, the students said they loved learning this challenging material in NIA's hands-on manner. Even those who had backgrounds in psychology rather than cellular neuroscience appreciated the NIA learning tool and realized they could use it in the future if they had to teach this subject.

After an introduction by me using the Equilibrium Potentials tutorial, the students spent the first two days working through the Membrane and Na Action Potential tutorials. The students seemed immediately unafraid of capacitance when they realized that it may be thought of as membrane area.

They then worked through voltage and patch clamping, and then the Axons tutorials with their moving signals. Near the end of the week, students chose other tutorials that particularly interested them and presented the essence of the chosen tutorial to the rest of the class. Some students even took on the challenging Kinetics and Dynamic Threshold tutorials, became clearly excited about these advanced subjects, and then explained them clearly to their peers. Altogether the week was extremely satisfying to this NIA author as I watched students truly enjoy learning about how neurons work.