Transcript here - Learning Objects Competition in Chemistry

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
my name is Benjamin Walliser and I am a PhD student at the Institute for Chemical and Biological Engineering (ICBE) at the Vienna Technical University.
(http://www.vt.tuwien.ac.at/bioressourcen_pflanzen_und_lebensmittel_wissenschaften/)
I would like to explain my intentions to you, though my contribution should be self-explanatory.
Intentions
The targeted audience are bachelor students, ideally studying nutrition science, agricultural science, plant sciences, biology and others. Mostly, biochemistry is an ‘unavoidable evil’ in
these study courses. I can relate to this, because biochemistry and chemistry in general were feared amongst my fellow students (agricultural studies). Thus, I intend to use this
presentation as a playful and understandable medium for teaching the formation of secondary metabolites (in this case flavonoids).
A main objective is the interactivity. The student should not passively consume the presentation, but should work actively. Subsequently, I added some small questions, which the
students need to answer. For one thing, these questions serve to firm the knowledge adopted in the animated reactions. For another thing, these questions ease the presentation a little
bit. As already mentioned, I animated the chemical reactions for an easy understanding.
Explanation of the slides
The whole presentation was designed to be handled exclusively with the computer mouse. By using the mouse wheel or keyboard, you could easily, even accidently, skip animations or
whole slides, which are important for the understanding of the flavonoid pathway. In order to draw attention on this, I added a slide in the beginning (slide 2), pointing out this issue.
Additionally, the pictograms used in the presentation are explained in this slide. I chose pictograms because they are intentionally and are a simple way to guide the student through the
slides.
Following the introduction, some information about the biological relevance of flavonoids, both in plants and humans, were added in order to illustrate why flavonoids are an important
class of secondary metabolites.
After this, a general overview over the different flavonoids and the pathway of the flavonoid biosynthesis is provided.
Then, the actual description of the flavonoid pathway starts, beginning with the amino acid phenylalanine. The presentation follows the flavonoid biosynthesis pathway with the scheme:
I.) Current flavonoid in the flavonoid pathway, II.) Animated and explained reaction; catalyzed by the enzymes (marked with clouds for an easy recognition), III.) some quizzes regarding the
flavonoid biosynthesis.
Finally, examples for anthocyanidins are shown and further modification reactions are mentioned.
I hope you will enjoy the learning tool.
Best regards,
Benjamin Walliser