David Salt is 'worth his salt,' says Science magazine

Science has now affirmed that GDL is a valuable resource in and of itself. Salt reports, "We used one-third of our GAP award to subcontract Spongelab (then known as vivetechnologies) to program GDL based on a design from Tommy Sors. The agreement between Spongelab and Purdue was that Purdue could use the original GDL free for educational purposes and that Spongelab could develop it further for commercial use. I am happy to say that we have deployed the original GDL in our exhibit to great success and also that Spongelab has gone on to develop the concept further and started to distribute it to a broader community commercially."

Although it is the current Spongelab version of the interactive gaming modules that caught the eye of the 2008 Visualization Challenge reviewers, both game sets are engaging and informative. Sors explains, "… game players are submerged deep within a living plant cell to experience the astonishing complexity and beauty of life's most fundamental processes. By testing a virtual plant's survival using different light, gas, and water conditions, the GDL player gets to live through and delight in the molecular changes that occur in the chloroplast, mitochondrion, and nucleus under the different environmental situations she/he has selected. The concept is simple and very effective in that a felt or sensed experience is more memorable than any factual knowledge gained from passively reading or memorizing a text book."

Want to play GDL? Free downloads are available at www.aspb.org/education . ASPB will distribute the original Genomics Digital Lab modules for free when used for educational purposes through the Society's website. The option of paying for the more advanced versions coming from Spongelab is also available via links at http://www.genomicsdigitallab.com/gdl/default.cfm.

More information on the GAP awards program is at the ASPB Education Foundation web site http://www.aspb.org/education/foundation/. The next call for GAP proposals opens March 16, 2009.

[sidebar – Panel of Judges for the Science & NSF 2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge]

Felice Frankel
Senior Research Fellow, FAS
Harvard University
Initiative in Innovative Computing
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Thomas Lucas
Thomas Lucas Productions Inc.
Ossining, New York

Sherry A. Marts
Vice President, Scientific Affairs
Society for Women's Health Research
Washington, D.C.

Gary Lees
Chairman & Director
Department of Art as Applied to Medicine
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Baltimore, Maryland

Patterson Clark
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.