IMMACULATE - Who said learning science can't be done in a game? Max Chatnoir a Professor at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, Texas created The Gene Pool as a site to use when teaching classes in genetics. Part of the difficulty of teaching online science classes is the lack of a lab. The Gene Pool contains simulated experiments that students use to enhance their online class work.

The Gene Pool explores the laws of inheritance (physical traits of a plant could be thought of terms of pairs of parental factors), which were discovered by Johann Gregor Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century. The Abbey of Saint Thomas in Mendel’s Garden is patterned after the still active monastery in the Czech Republic in Brno. Textures used in Second Life have been donated by the Mendel Museum.  

The Gene Pool contains notecards with information about much of Mendel’s writing as well as Web sites to refer to for further information. The Greenhouse, Garden and Orangery have displays showing the results of cross breeding between various types of peas and flowers.  Each is set up as an experiment, asking the user to observe and predict results following a particular rule (such as “Two hybrid parents will produce yellow and green progeny in a ratio of about 3:1. One hybrid x one green parent will produce yellow and green progeny in a ratio of about 1.2. Click on the dish, count the peas of the two different colors, and guess the parents.”). An element of randomness has been added to the plant display, so that the different data will appear each time the experiment is run.

Students can drop their work into notebooks for Chatnoir to examine.  A utility notebook allows students to run a Chi Square statistical analysis on their data collected.

A six floor high rise building contains much of the molecular genetic information students can explore. It has a warning on the elevator that brought quite a chuckle to the crowd.  “WARNING: In case of emergency, DO NOT USE ELEVATOR. Simply jump off the side of the building and fly away.”

The ground floor displays a presentation on the discovery that genetic information is composed of DNA.  A Watson-Crick DNA model is replicated showing the double helical structure of DNA.  A “working” centrifuge can be used. Mice live or fall over depending on the genes in the organisms they were injected with.  (For our PETA readers, the mice reincarnate and run around moments after their fall.)

The second floor has some experiments illustrating the relationship of DNA to proteins. There is a RNA message to be decoded in a bottle using a linked translation program. Students can turn both the protein emission and the RNA on and off by clicking on the ribosome parts. Regretfully the ribosomes are messy and dribble all over the counter.