academics

ACADEMICS

For professors and students who are more than ready to move on from classes that have anything to do with “virtual learning,”

chemistry professor Brad Sturgeon and some of his colleagues in the Center for Science and Business might say, “Not so fast.”

In April, Sturgeon put to use for the first time the College’s eight new sets of virtual reality equipment. The laptop and Oculus Rift S headset systems, which are portable, join three other “fixed” VR systems in the CSB, which have been used by kinesiology instructor Jen Braun and biology professor Kevin Baldwin to help teach anatomy.

On the day they debuted, Sturgeon put the systems in the hands of some of his senior students, before using them the following week with one of his introductory classes. The goal, he said, is to have the new VR systems ready to use this fall for his general chemistry and quantum mechanics courses.

“It really does bring it to life,” said Sturgeon of the molecular visualization that students can experience using the systems, which were acquired through a crowdfunding initiative. “The molecule just floats right in front of you.”

After strapping on a headset and controllers for each hand, students can virtually take hold of a given molecule, enlarging or shrinking it as they see fit and rotating it in any direction to better observe a part of the molecule they wish to examine.

“Once I learn how to do it myself, I could enter a ‘room’ with seven other students, and I could hold a molecule, and then I could literally pass it to them and they could take over,” said Sturgeon. “You can also modify the chemical structure. We have to visualize molecules with these sorts of tools, because the molecules are too small to examine with a microscope.”

Outside of the sciences, Sturgeon said the new VR systems might be used for some of the College’s “Global Perspectives” courses.

“In the future, I hope that the equipment can be used to explore global perspectives using the Google Earth VR software that can take you anywhere in the world,” he said. “Just type in an address, and it takes you there immediately,” even by flying, once users get acclimated to the hand controls.

In fact, Sturgeon uses the Google Earth software as a way to get his chemistry students used to working in virtual reality.

“You really learn how to use the hand controls,” he said. “It gets the students more comfortable as they prepare to work with molecular models.”

Of course, today’s generation of students has quite a head start when it comes to working with “It really does bring it to life. The molecule just floats right in front of you.” —Professor Brad Sturgeon such technology. “They pick things up a lot faster, and they’re very willing to jump in and do it,” said Sturgeon. “The majority of my students so far have been extremely savvy with the equipment and know how to navigate it.” Baldwin spoke about bringing the first set of VR equipment to campus a few years ago. “It’s the way things are starting to head,” he said. “Medical schools are using this. I got excited about VR when I went to a conference and a professor at a medical school used it, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is a lot better than it used to be. This is pretty amazing.’ I figured, if I got excited about it, students are probably going to get pretty excited about it.” Hannah McVey, an exercise science major who graduated in May, found the VR experience enlightening. “It gives you a different perspective,” she said. “You can go inside the heart and look around. With each pump, you can see the valves moving. You can peel different layers off the heart and see all the different layers and the valves and each chamber.” Braun and Baldwin said VR complements the other ways that students learn. “If they see it on paper, if they see it in an anatomy and physiology lab and if they see it on a screen, it’s just allowing them to have that much more an opportunity to make it stick in their head,” said Braun. “We have our real specimens—bones, cadavers—that they can learn on, but this is a way of supplementing that and giving them another avenue to access the material,” said Baldwin. —Barry McNamara

Chemistry professor Brad Sturgeon (center) gave his senior students the first crack at using the College’s eight new virtual reality systems. In the foreground is Hannah Hofmann ’21, while Sturgeon assists Sara Simonson ’22.

ACADEMICS

hree Monmouth College environmental studies and sustainability majors and their professor have outlined a plan for how the campus could become carbon neutral in the next decade.

Danielle Ito-LaBelle ’21, Nyasaina Kwamboka ’23 and Grace Simpson ’22 joined biology professor Ken Cramer in presenting a proposal last spring to the campus community.

“We have to use things in a way that we don’t rob future generations—that we don’t destroy the system upon which we all depend,” said Cramer, who noted that a major reason to move toward carbon neutrality is to mitigate the effects of climate change. “Climate change is really a problem of waste and degradation. We’re dumping too much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One of those is carbon dioxide.”

Cramer and the students want Monmouth to join nearly a dozen U.S. colleges and universities that have achieved carbon neutrality, including residential liberal arts colleges similar to Monmouth.

“This is not pie-in-the-sky dreaming,” said Cramer. “This is stuff that can be done.”

For their campus presentation, each student discussed an element of renewable energy.

“Solar energy is the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy source available, and the United States has some of the richest solar resources in the whole world,” said Kwamboka. “That helps the environment by reducing the dependence on non-renewable energy, such as fossil fuels, and thus reduces air pollution and water pollution.”

She said that part of the group’s proposal is for the College to install LED lights in parking lots, along sidewalks and for emergency lighting.

“We would also like to maximize our solar output by installing solar on our buildings that have large roofs—the Center for Science and Business, the Huff Athletic Center and Hewes Library,” she said.

Monmouth business and science students are helping test cutting-edge panels for a leading solar company with panels that have been installed on top of the Center for Science and Business.

Simpson focused on wind energy. “Wind is an inexhaustible resource that will provide the College a large return on investment,” she said. “By utilizing this resource, Monmouth College will be following in the footsteps of other successful small liberal arts colleges.” She said that one Midwest residential liberal arts college projects to save $1 million over the 20-year lifespan of a wind turbine it installed on campus.

“This is not “Solar and wind energy are both growing pie-in-the-sky incredibly rapidly, and coal is declining,” said Cramer. “Renewable energy has been around for a dreaming. This is long time. It’s tested, proven technologies. It’s just stuff that can be a matter of expanding our use of it so that we can protect the environment a little better and still do done.” the things we like to do.” The group showed that by a large margin coal has been king as a source of energy over the last 70 years in the United States. But coal’s use peaked around 2005 and has been in sharp decline since 2010. Meanwhile, the use of biofuels and wind has risen significantly since 2000, and solar has made strong gains in the past five years. Solar’s photovoltaic capacity in megawatts is predicted to be 10 times higher in 2023 than it was just five years ago. Although wind usage peaked a decade ago, its plateau is still at a high level, with much of that usage coming from the interior regions of the country. Part of the proposal was for the College to hire a full-time sustainability officer by the summer of 2022. “We will pass on our report to subsequent generations,” said Cramer. “If and when we have a sustainability coordinator, that should be the first thing they would read just to save them some initial work. You have to have someone who is dedicated to doing this full-time.” The proposal’s first steps call for a greenhouse gas audit and to form a sustainability advisory committee. By next year, the group hopes to see individual energy metering of each building, which the students said would help drive dorm competitions to decrease usage. —Barry McNamara