Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Online Spectrometry Lab Will Let Undergraduates Try Out Costly Equipment By DAN CARNEVALE A mass spectrometer is a complicated and expensive piece of equipment -- so complicated and so expensive, in fact, that most undergraduate chemistry students never get a chance to use one. Now professors at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have developed what they call a Virtual Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. It gives students who wouldn't otherwise have access to the bricks-and-mortar version of such a lab a chance to experience how the equipment works. Spectrometers allow chemists to study the composition of compounds such as proteins and polymers. The equipment can read a molecule's "fingerprint," from which chemists can identify it. Spectrometers are sensitive enough to identify traces of a substance found in a person's blood, urine, or hair. The virtual mass-spectrometry lab lets students practice with the same kind of technology in four online case studies. In one, for instance, they try detecting whether cocaine is found in a lock of someone's hair. In another, they must identify -- from blood samples -- the animals participating in a futuristic Olympics whose contestants represent different species. Mark E. Bier, director of the Center for Molecular Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University, helped develop the virtual mass-spectrometry lab. He wanted students to be able to customize their experiments by controlling variables -- using different types of acid to attempt to break down a substance, for example, or changing the temperature at which a substance is tested. Students can adjust the virtual equipment so they can focus on different aspects of any test -- and potentially get inaccurate results. "You can go down a lot of different paths and come up with slightly different answers, just like in the real world," Mr. Bier says. "We want the students to be able to make mistakes." The virtual lab's creators included data representing different substances that could be tested, as well as a wide range of machine settings. Each test can be tweaked by the student, resulting in thousands of possible outcomes. While real spectrometers can cost about $1-million, the virtual mass-spectrometry lab was put together with $425,000 from a National Science Foundation grant. And experiments that would normally take days can be completed in hours, Mr. Bier says. Since the virtual lab is "carefully designed to allow students great freedom with no risks, we believe it will engage them via the discovery process in a way traditional course experiments rarely can," says Joseph Grabowski. Mr. Grabowski is a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh who helped develop the virtual lab. The project is still being fine-tuned, and Mr. Bier hopes to have the virtual lab finished by the fall. He expects small colleges that don't have spectrometry equipment to use the online lab. Mr. Bier plans to have his undergraduate chemistry students use the online spectrometry lab as a learning supplement. "They will have a much better understanding about what it takes to solve a case study," he says. "We're picking real-life problems that we think will generate interest." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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