Teaching with a Visual Tree of Life

The extensive data set of evolutionary relationships between organisms is often referred to as the Tree of Life. Providing an effective visual interface for teachers and students to interact with this data set requires bringing together work from many disciplines: computer science, information visualization, human-computer interaction, information classification and retrieval, systematic biology, and evolution education. Through interviews and a survey with teachers and professionals in the field of biology we have developed key recommendations for designing and evaluating the efficacy of existing and future tree-structured data browsers. The Tree of Life can be seen in many different contexts: as an index to a biological information space, as a taxonomy, and as a map showing relationships between organisms. Our project falls within the realm of larger efforts to uncover and visualize the branching relationships between organisms. The goals of our project include ! Understanding how teachers currently teach about the evolutionary relationships between organisms ! Identifying common teaching tasks involving the Tree of Life ! Determining how the future software might facilitate those tasks Our work was conducted as part of the outreach efforts of the NSF CIPRES project, and culminated in a set of recommendations for a future Tree of Life web application. We used several assessment techniques to determine teachers' needs for an interactive Tree of Life application. First, we conducted interviews with educators, graduate students, and professionals in the field of biology. Then we observed teachers at two public workshops about the Tree of Life. Finally, we used what we learned in our interviews and teaching observations to conduct exploratory-comparative usability evaluations and a user survey. Our findings about a Tree of Life application can be categorized into several broad themes: ! The educational context in which the application exists ! Valuable educational messages that the application must help teachers convey ! Desired features of a Tree of Life application A future Tree of Life application must support the educational context in which it is used, and must allow teachers to convey the educational messages that they are required to teach. Respondents to our survey rated the following features of a future Tree of Life application to be most important. ! Zooming in to any part of the tree ! Seeing areas of controversy Denise Green and Rebecca Shapley 6 ! Viewing the relationship of divergence events to geological time ! Seeing the distribution of important character states …