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While the education use of GENESIS is an integral part of GENESIS user support, with this grant we propose a major enhancement and extension of this aspect of our effort. The reason is that the new Java-based GENESIS interface we are proposing to construct, provides an unprecedented opportunity to expand the use of GENESIS in neuroscience and computational neuroscience education. As we have already described, use in education then supports application to research problems.
Most of the existing GENESIS tutorials are either linear and text-based, as in the Book of GENESIS (Bower and Beeman, 1998), or are in the form of standalone GENESIS simulations that have popup windows containing descriptive text. The new Java-based interface we propose to construct will provide a much more integrated and powerful plaftorm for tutorial-based education. In fact, in association with last years GENESIS users meeting, we have already begun to create browser-based tutorials both for teaching basic neuroscience concepts (for example, see http://www.genesis-sim.org/GENESIS/cnsweb/cnslecs.html) as well as for specific instruction in the creation of new GENESIS simulations (for example, see http://www.genesis-sim.org/GENESIS/gum-tutorials/beeman/index.html). In their present form, these web-based tutorials rely on images captured from GENESIS simulations run independently. The plannned browser-based interface to GENESIS will allow us to directly link simulations to hypertext tutorials, allowing much more interactivity.
With support from this grant, we will specifically update our existing tutorials (e.g. PSP propagation in dendrites, the Hodgkin-Huxley model, and the role of various ionic conductances in determining firing patterns) and implement them in the new interface. As part of this effort, we will "web-ize" The Book of GENESIS making it freely available over the Internet. We will also develop a new series of tutorials for basic neuroscience education including a tutorial specifically intended to expose students to the many different varieties of neurons that make up the nervous system. Through a series of computer experiments, the student will discover the roles that morphology and the distribution of ionic conductances play in the function of these different types of cells. We will also take advantage of the growing number of network level research simulations to develop additional examples of network organization. Finally, we will develop a new set of simulations related to subcellular interactions governing synaptic transmission and plasticity.