All Hands on Deck: Teaching Lymphocyte Activation by Using Role Play and Colored Gloves

摘要

The interactions of immune cells during lymphocyte activation is beautifully orchestrated, but learning how the “alphabet soup” of cell receptors and cells interact with each other can be daunting. Active learning and kinesthetic strategies that support traditional lectures can make topics easier to conceptualize. Such physical activities have been used throughout science education, yielding improvements of 20% to 50% based on pre/post assessment analysis (1–6), and benefits extend to both the student actors and the audience (1). They have been used to successfully teach quorum sensing (7), membrane transport (2), the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (3), and other biological concepts (4, 5), including the immune system (1, 8). The 25-minute activity described here focuses on the specific function and interactions of various immune cell receptors leading to lymphocyte activation, building on a previously published role play activity looking broadly at lymphocyte activation (8). It also demonstrates how linked recognition occurs with complex antigens. The study took place at a primarily undergraduate institution with classes of 10 to 64 students, and most participants were from a second-year nursing student cohort. The primary learning outcome is that students are able to map activation of the humoral immune response.