Teaching apps

Apps to learn interactively during remote teaching. The pandemic has presented unique challenges when it comes to teaching, especially lab courses. Students miss out on potentially the most important aspects of a lab course - interacting directly with the natural phenomena, investigating using scientific data collection techniques, and validating theories and laws studied in lectures with their observations. To partially circumvent this issue, I created a suite of apps that allow undergraduate students to setup and perform experiments tailored for the Introductory BIOL 101 lab course ranging from photosynthesis to gel electrophoresis. These apps are used regularly by undergraduate students at UNC Chapel Hill during the BIOL 101 laboratory course.

effect of light color on photosynthesis

Students investigate the role of wavelength of light on photosynthesis. The simulation allows students to use a virtual spectrophotometer to measure the rate of photosynthesis.

role of cofactors in enzyme function

Students understand the role of cofactors in enzyme function by using chelating agents to inhibit certain cofactos from binding to the enzyme.

Gel electrophoresis

Students setup a gel including loading the wells with DNA samples, attaching carbon electrodes, and running the gel. The final result is observed under UV light.

process of science

A fun way to understand and formulate steps of a complete experiment (i.e., setting up hypothesis, protocol, data collection and interpretration) by testing the effectiveness of various handwashing soaps

research apps

Apps to facilitate kinematic data collection and analysis. These apps are often complemented with command line functions that allow extracting 3D position data from recorded videos.

switching between DLC and DLT

DeepLabCut and DLTdv are quite common tools used for tracking and extracting position/ kinematic data from recorded videos. This app allows using tracked data in DLT as training data in DLC. Furthermore, the tracked data in DLC can be converted to DLT file format for easy visualization.

morphometric measurements

Quick calibration and extraction of various morphometric measurements of interest from a 2D image. Same measurements can be performed by multiple users and the app averages the measurements as the final output.