• Learning about Drug Dosages with STELLA
• EcoFish Turns "Hands-on" Experiments into "Brains-on" Simulations
• Technical Support at isee systems—A unique experience
• Upcoming Workshop in Colorado Springs, June 27-29th

Dr. Sara Rosenbaum
Univ of Rhode Island
  

Sara Rosenbaum, Professor of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Rhode Island’s School of Pharmacy, uses STELLA to help her students understand dosage levels and drug effects. She teaches courses in both pharmacokinetics, the study of drug concentrations in the body and how they change over time, and pharmacodynamics, the study of how drug concentrations impact the time course and extent of the drug’s effect.

“The minute I was introduced to STELLA I saw how useful it would be in teaching students about how drug doses are determined and the factors that control the time course of drug response,” says Rosenbaum. “There are established models that show the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic characteristics of particular drugs. I recreated those models in STELLA to make them interactive and fun to use.”

The models are used extensively in Rosenbaum’s classes. She uses STELLA’s storytelling features to explain the structure of the models and how they can be built in STELLA. Understanding the model components and running simulations helps students understand how patient characteristics, medication interactions, and changing concentrations combine to produce good, or bad, results. Students are able to access models on-line where they are shared via isee NetSim. (You can view the models by clicking here.)

One model, Infusion Challenge, serves as a game. Students are given patient and drug characteristics and are challenged to find a safe, effective dosing regimen. If concentrations of the drug in the patient’s body get too high, students receive a message like “Bad news from the patient. His wife just called; he’s disoriented, nauseous. She’s worried he may be drinking”. They have to make adjustments based on the new information they’ve been given. Other messages tell students that the patient is receiving a new medication. They have to think about interactions and decide if the dosage of their medication has to be changed. They continue to receive messages when corrections are needed.

“This is a very real life exercise,” says Rosenbaum. “Hospital and retail pharmacists have to be aware of changes in all the medications patients are taking. They have to make adjustments all the time.”

While the majority of Rosenbaum’s undergraduate students have no experience with modeling, they are “computer savvy” and catch on fast. Towards the end of the semester, they are required to build an interactive model of their own. This year the topic was methadone. “Methadone is a complicated and dangerous drug that is commonly used to control pain or prevent withdrawal symptoms in patients addicted to opiate drugs,” explains Rosenbaum.

STELLA gives students a safe way to experiment with methadone dosage levels. It also allows them to exercise other talents. “Some students go wild with their projects,” says Rosenbaum. “They incorporate photos and videos in their models. One group used Darth Vader as their patient. He’d had a heart transplant; his heart had grown too evil. Of course, they had to carefully consider his other medications in determining the dosage of his anti-rejections drugs. Another group based their scenario on Lord of the Rings. It’s great when science students have a chance to be creative and use their artistic talents.”

When she’s not teaching, Rosenbaum conducts and presents research. She also writes. Wiley and Sons recently published her new textbook Basic Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics: An Integrated Textbook and Computer Simulations. The book includes exercises that are based on the STELLA models she uses in class. Using isee NetSim, Rosenbaum published the models referred to in the book on the Internet for easy access.

“NetSim offers tremendous advantages for sharing models on the Internet,” says Rosenbaum. “I use it to share models with my own students and colleagues and now it’s helping students and teachers who are reading my book.”

Rosenbaum plans to extend her use of STELLA to develop models teach students how to develop patient-specific doses for certain tricky medications like wafarin. “Warfarin is a widely prescribed medicine that prevents blood clots from forming or growing inside blood vessels,” says Rosenbaum. “It’s a very complicated drug whose dose is influenced by diet, genetics, and other medications. It can take weeks to determine the correct dosage. I’d like to create a model that will help clinicians understand wafarin’s properties so that they can more quickly prescribe the correct dosage.”

The STELLA models Rosenbaum employs in teaching, writing, and research are all based on known standards and outcomes but there’s great value in seeing how medications move through a patient’s body; changing in concentration and producing both intended and unintended effects. “The output of models can be really eye-opening for students,” says Rosenbaum. “STELLA helps students really understand pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. It’s a great teaching tool.”

For more information on Basic Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics: An Integrated Textbook and Computer Simulations, visit http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470569069.html.

Dr. William Neill
Texas A & M University
 

For the past 35 years, Dr. William Neill, Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A & M University, has been teaching Biology of Fishes, a course that explores how changing environmental variables affect the physiological and behavioral responses of fish. He came to clearly appreciate the challenge of preparing and maintaining labs that allow controlled experiments to teach students about how fish perform in real-world environments.

“After a while I didn’t want to struggle with lab logistics and maintaining all the equipment and live fish we needed,” explains Neill. “Equipment breaks and needs to be repaired, fish get sick and die, and tank systems require a lot of maintenance. I was also spending more and more energy defending the use of live fish in my teaching labs.”

“People who were concerned about animal rights welfare wanted to know why we were experimenting with live fish to show students things that were already known. I knew that hands-on experimentation helped students truly understand how the environment impacted fish. But, as I listened to critics and their concerns, I thought, ‘Hey, they’ve got a point.’ I considered how I might develop a virtual fish and, in so doing, change the lab from ‘hands-on’ to more ‘brains-on.” In the back of his mind, Neill was thinking also about the growing need to teach people far removed from the Texas A&M campus, both in space and time, via “distance education.”

It was critical to Neill and his students that any virtual fish must faithfully mimic the things once done by real fish in the identical lab exercises. The result was “EcoFish,” a STELLA model based on the 1947 monograph, Effects of the Environment on Animal Activity, written by F.E.J. Fry at the University of Toronto. Fry erected five classes of environmental factors that affect the ability of fish to perform their life functions. Those relationships explain the connections between environmental variables and fish adaptations – or failures to adapt.

Neill had been introduced to STELLA by a colleague, Dr. Bill Grant. Grant long had used STELLA in teaching ecological-systems modeling at Texas A&M. Neill recognized the “user friendly” nature of STELLA, and made the jump from less intuitive simulation platforms like Fortran. First came the research-based core of EcoFish, called Ecophys.Fish, then the teaching model, with its added responses and the input-output features necessary to represent the previous exercises with real fish. Neill pledged fidelity to the original experiments, and it is this adherence to authenticity to which he credits the success of EcoFish.

“With EcoFish, students can do in a virtual sense what their predecessors once did with real fish,” says Neill. “They can examine stomach evacuation in a group of stochastically varying fish that were given the same meal. They can collect the “data” regarding dry weight of stomach contents and see how that weight declines over time, as fish digest their food. They can also look at how fish ”enviroregulate“ behaviorally in horizontal gradients of temperature and vertical gradients of dissolved oxygen. They can explore the lethal effects of ammonia and copper toxicity—and their potential interactions. They can even do what students studying actual fish in a one-semester class could never do: run simulated growth experiments over periods of weeks or years, compare the results with “ground truth” obtained in real experiments; then ask, what if the observed series of temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, pH had been different—owing, say, to “global warming” (or cooling)?

Since it’s not a real fish, EcoFish doesn’t have to be collected, kept in a tank, carefully fed precise quantities of feed, exposed to changing environmental conditions, or dissected. Better yet, because it is digital, EcoFish can, in effect, live in unlimited numbers, sizes, etc., on the Internet. Moreover, as Neill reminds his students, “EcoFish feels no pain; indeed, it is up to you and me, to feel EcoFish’s pain for it.” The analytical rigors of the lab-exercise workups make the pain all too real for some.

Making his course and EcoFish web-accessible helped him reach people who couldn’t come to class because they were too far away or had time conflicts. “It’s my obligation as a teacher, especially one at a public university, to reach out and share ideas and understanding with people everywhere. I needed to find a way to engage students who were at a distance from the physical classroom. EcoFish has allowed me to teach students all over the world, from Belgium to Hawaii.” Neill records local class sessions via Camtasia and posts them to a Texas A&M server. Distant students log into a website to playback class lectures and then run EcoFish models on their own computers to complete their lab work. From fees collected, Neill provides each distant student a license for STELLA.

“EcoFish has stretched my own capabilities and those of STELLA - although I realize I probably have re-invented wheels others have been rolling for some time,” says Neill. “For example, with the help of one of my students, I’ve even written my own routine to do linear regression analysis on the fly. That’s important, because EcoFish sometimes needs to make statistically-based ecophysiological decisions within a simulated experiment.”

Moving from hands-on experiments with real fish to brains-on simulations with EcoFish has also yielded unanticipated benefits. “I quickly realized that EcoFish eliminated the distractions of lab confusion, delays and frustration,” says Neill. “When students didn’t have to worry about dying fish or malfunctioning equipment, they could focus on the biological principles involved, and on how the findings from the sequence of labs came together to create a synthetic whole. They could apply what was learned in one lab to the next.”

EcoFish also taught Neill and his colleagues about their course and its content. “I had no idea EcoFish would teach me so much about what we still needed to learn,” says Neill. “The model showed me gaping holes in our knowledge, and suggested new hypotheses.”

Students also find holes in the knowledge and in EcoFish. When they point out that EcoFish doesn’t include a variable or respond in a reasonable way, Neill challenges them to edit and add to the model. Graduate students are required to modify EcoFish or create their own fish biology model using STELLA. “STELLA is intuitive and students like looking at the model diagrams and running simulations,” says Neill. “However, many students have trouble with analytical thinking and quantitative work. It comes down to math and critical thinking skills. I think EcoFish teaches them a lot about that.”

Like most people who spend a lot of time with STELLA, Neill has done his share of thinking about the role Systems Thinking should be playing in education, research, and the world in general. “Barry Richmond, the creator of STELLA, pointed out that our larger problems haven’t changed too much over time. We still worry about pollution, crime, and overpopulation. He wondered why we’d made so little progress and thought it might be because the way we think is outdated. He suggested that we must turn to systems approaches. I think he was right. I think we have to start teaching kids how to use Systems Thinking in elementary school. I’m a strong believer in technology that makes Systems Thinking easier to do and share. I’m a strong believer in STELLA itself.”

This August, EcoFish will adapt to a big change in its environment. Bill Neill is retiring. In the fall 0f 2012, he’ll return to Texas A & M as Professor Emeritus and teach Biology of Fishes one last time. isee systems would like to congratulate Bill on his long and distinguished career and thank him for introducing so many students to Systems Thinking, through the STELLA model EcoFish. Already evolved into new model variants including EcoShrimp, Neill’s model is sure to influence biology students and aquatic scientists for years to come.

If you would like a 16-minute audio-image “tour” of EcoFish from Dr. Neill himself, click on http://wfscdisted.tamu.edu/Neill/EcoFishPresShort600x800.html.

Sarah Davie
isee systems
 

When it comes to isee systems, though, rest assured that none of the above scenarios are occurring. The Connector recently sat down with Sarah Davie, isee’s Technical Support Manager, to find out what makes isee’s support experience so refreshingly different. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

What is different about the isee technical support experience?

Also, when one of us starts working with a customer on a particular issue, the same person continues to work on it until it’s resolved. This is good for both the customer and for us. The customer doesn’t have to explain the problem more than once, and it’s more rewarding for us to see the problem through to resolution. Together, we are learning more about what our software can do—the combination of features seems limitless. It certainly is not boring!

Another big difference is our customers themselves. They are very bright and can challenge us with some tough questions! They tend to be passionate about the models they are creating and it is fun working with people who enjoy what they’re doing. I don’t think this is common for other software companies.

What types of questions do you respond to?

Sarah:  We get so many different questions from around the world about a wide spectrum of models. The applications are incredibly varied, so a support request is a great opportunity for us to learn about what our customers are modeling. If I were to try to categorize the questions, I would say the two basic types would be “How to?”, and “Why is this not working as I expected?” The “How to?” questions are more about how to use a particular feature of the software or how to best model a certain scenario. The “Why is this not working?” requests include: why is the software failing under a certain situation, or why do the results look different then what I had expected?

We can answer some questions very quickly but sometimes we need to really dig deep to get an answer. There may be a lot of back and forth with the customer, which helps us gather more information for troubleshooting. If we still can’t figure out the problem, our software developers are right down the hall and can help us out if needed. They are usually very busy developing new code, so we try to keep our interruptions to a minimum.

So customers contact you with problems. How do you handle that kind of stress on a daily basis?

Sarah:  It doesn’t really seem stressful; it’s a lot like doing a puzzle. When you get the answer, it’s very satisfying. Our customers are well aware of the many features in our software and the complexity of the systems they are modeling. They don’t expect us to have all the answers immediately and are greatly appreciative of our efforts.

Can anyone contact technical support?

Sarah:  Anyone who owns our software and has a current support contract can contact us. Customers often don’t realize that when they buy a new software license or upgrade an existing license, one year of technical support and maintenance is included.

University professors who teach courses using STELLA or iThink often require their students to create their own models. Since we can’t do homework for them, students are not eligible for support. But faculty members do get support and are often surprised to hear that if their university owns lab licenses, the lab license will continue to get upgrades and support for free as long as the faculty license remains current. That’s a pretty good deal considering that support renewal on a faculty license is only $99 per year!

Do you have any suggestions for customers who may be on the fence about contacting isee’s technical support?

Sarah:  Recently a customer called who said he had been trying for a long time to figure out a problem in the software. He finally thought to contact us, and was pleasantly surprised when he got an immediate response and answer to his question. He was very appreciative and realized he could have saved a lot of time by contacting us sooner.

My suggestion is don’t hesitate to call or send us an e-mail. We are eager to help customers so they aren’t in a quandary for too long!

Introduction to Dynamic Modeling with STELLA and iThink   Hosts: isee systems Lexidyne, LLC Dates: June 27-29, 2011 Location: Antlers Hilton Colorado Springs, CO Discounts: 20% for University 50% for K-12 To learn more or to register, visit www.iseesystems.com/workshop   Special hotel room rates available until May 27, 2011