Students often become moving parts in her demos—for example, they make great motor proteins. A volunteer in O'Dowd's lecture might portray a kinesin, carrying the vesicle-wig across the giant cell's microtubule tracks, or one in a lineup of myosins, pulling and pushing to simulate muscle contraction. Dozing off in class is dangerous—the sleepy undergrad could wind up starring as the “resting neuron” in a one-act play on nerve cell stimulation.

O'Dowd tries to break through the invisible barrier between the lecturer droning at the podium and the students slouched in their chairs. “They have to feel like they're people in your class, not just one in a sea of faces,” she says.

Even those who remain seated are engaged, shouting out instructions to their friends onstage. “They stop looking at their computers and start looking at the lecture,” says graduate student Melissa Strong, who was a teaching assistant in the course. In one demonstration, O'Dowd uses tennis balls to represent hydrogen ions in the blood, and invites six students to come to the front of the room and act as carbonic acid and bicarbonate ions buffering the blood's pH. Three tennis balls “in solution”—that is, on the floor—represent the ideal pH. The job of the student buffers is to pick up or drop tennis balls to maintain that perfect state. Once, O'Dowd set out five “hydrogens,” two too many. When three students reached for balls, she recalls, “The whole class yelled, ‘Nooo!’” The third bicarbonate quickly dropped his ball, keeping the blood pH at equilibrium.

In an anonymous survey, 90 percent of students rated the demos “helpful,” O'Dowd reported earlier this year in the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education. Vivian Nguyen, a junior who works in O'Dowd's lab, recalls that the textbook was crammed with details, but the demos “went straight to the point.” Sophomore Marina Nemetalla says she thought back to demonstrations during exams and continues to do so now in her research. During a recent lab meeting, Nemetalla even launched into a demonstration of her own, using colored beads to represent DNA bases.

The students are not the only ones to benefit. O'Dowd says she gets more satisfaction from teaching than in years past. Inspiring young people provides rewards that her research on learning and memory in fruit flies cannot. No fellow neurobiologist has ever written her with the comment she occasionally hears from her students: “You changed my life.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION: To see some of O'Dowd's classroom demos, visit www.researchandteaching.bio.uci.edu/lecture_demo.html.

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