Expanding Our Teaching Repertoire With Writing and Role-Play

The relationship between teaching conversation through role play and speaking

Role-plays provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate how to use English in real life situations and make them focus more on communication than on grammar. Oral presentations like conversations are a great way for students to practice their English skills. Therefore, this paper makes an attempt to investigate whether teaching conversation through role play affects the students’ speaki...

Expanding NEURON's Repertoire of Mechanisms with NMODL

Neuronal function involves the interaction of electrical and chemical signals that are distributed in time and space. The mechanisms that generate these signals and regulate their interactions are marked by a rich diversity of properties that precludes a "one size fits all" approach to modeling. This article presents a summary of how the model description language NMODL enables the neuronal sim...

Expanding the prion disease repertoire.

In 1982, Stanley Prusiner proposed that the infectious agent of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), a group of relatively rare neurodegenerative disorders that includes Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and scrapie, lacks replicating nucleic acids and instead is composed primarily of a misfolded conformation of the prion protein, which he termed PrP (1). Originally, the “prion” hypothesis...

Writing to our patients.

Teaching Composition using Role Play and Feedback from Multiple Agents

Writing is an extremely difficult task because it requires the simultaneous solution of multiple, often conflicting constraints. This paper describes a two-component system which helps students write by helping them learn what the different constraints are, and how to address them. The first component is a 3D role-playing environment in which students control characters that are put in difficul...