Review for:Translation: The Movie

posted: on June 3, 2008 at 10:57AM

Protein Synthesis

Translation

I wanted to preview translation with my students prior to time in class on the topic and prior to the reading they were completing on the topic.

A.P., Honors or Advanced, Intro or Regular, Remedial

We watched this animation in class. I asked students to described what they were seeing and what parts they had heard of before from otehr science courses or from ealier in the year in this course. They were able to recall what the knew about ribosomes and protein structure. Many of them knew about mRNA and tRNA from middle school science.

Provides visualization or animation, Provides practice or tutorial, Provides additional content, Increases student engagement and motivation

It is a very colorful and well made animation. The 3-D shape of the molecules and structures is very helpful. It is hard to visualize the translocation of a ribosome and how the amino acids are going to fit together. I find previewing translation first helps my students recall what they already know about the process. They know quite a bit because the know what a ribosome is, that RNA is somehow involved, and that a protein is a sequence of amino acids. They have to work to synthesize these topics that have been presented separately together on their own. This animation helps them do that. When the complete the reading in preparation for class the next day, they have a much better sense of what they have read. When we go through the details of the process the next day they are much quicker to understand each of the steps.

The biggest weakness of this animation is that it is an "embedded Windows Media movie of the translation process. Depending upon the speed of your internet connection and the bandwith usage of the site, this file (27 MB) may take some time to finish buffering." (quite from the website) If the movie pauses during playing it can take a long time to rebuffer. This can be really frustrating because the animation is great, but you can't rely on it to play continuously every time. I habe found in helps to load the widow in advance of class and keep the link open until you are ready to use it. This works most of the time but not always.