Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 9 | Page 24

ARTICLE #2 | 25 24 | JADE HELEN A. MILLWARDNAY ÖZEN Competing Interests The author declares that they have no competing interests. ARTICLE #2 Title Tri-Hard Pipetting: Demonstrating pipetting accuracy using Die Hard with a Vengeance Author L. A. Robinson Contact [email protected] University of Derby Introduction The importance of routine laboratory techniques is repeatedly emphasised to first year undergraduates but the ability to communicate these issues in an engaging manner is always challenging. A fundamental laboratory technique (especially in relation to Molecular Biology) is that of accurate pipetting due to the small volume transfers often involved. This key skill is used throughout the student’s degree and possibly future employment; it is therefore essential that students master this technique early in their course. Approaches have been developed to try and assess students accuracy with these skills (Epping, 2010) and it appears that this is a universal and persistent issue (Balakrishnan, 2013). In relation to the setting up of experiments such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the alteration of volume will cause variance within, for example, primer concentration which may result in failure of an experimental protocol. The ease of introducing error and the resulting impact on laboratory work (Rawlinson, 2017) can be difficult to demonstrate; the exercise outlined here was created to show the direct impact caused by inaccurate pipetting. The use of multimedia within teaching is now a common occurrence due to the ease of access to suitable resources via sharing platforms such as YouTube as well as educational tools such as Box of Broadcasts (BoB). It has long been accepted that students have different methods of learning and will do so in different ways; this is represented through various learning styles and models (Coffield et al., 2004). The use of video’s can often be used for purely demonstrative purposes when presenting material to students in order to enhance teaching. In addition, movies can be used to spark creative thinking and discussion to enhance learning, for example with the use of science fiction to teach physics (Dark, 2005), medical fiction within pharmacology and professionalism (Farre, 2004; Lumlertgul, 2009) and the teaching of literary theory (Muller, 2006). The use of video clips has been shown to directly improve learning (Berk, 2009) but these resources can also be used indirectly to inspire teaching. The use of games in education has increased dramatically in recent years (Robinson, 2016) with tutors introducing ‘gamification’ to teaching either by use of developed games brought into the classroom, or games designed for a specific aspect of teaching. Gamification has been shown to be a successful approach within higher education (McCoy et al., 2016; Bajko et al., 2015) and has also been brought into the laboratory (Drace, 2013). As gamification has been shown to increase student engagement (da Rocha Seixas, Gomes, & de Melo Filho, 2016) and the use of multimedia