UNAM academics and students innovate on educational platforms

• InnovaUNAM competition prizes were awarded for teaching and learning the contents of practical curricula in sciences and humanities from a distance.
• Leonardo Lomeli Vanegas said: It is essential that these initiatives be known and that they continue to be developed.
• Jorge Vazquez Ramos confirmed that the projects make it possible to modify the way in which the contents are taught and the interaction with the students.

New technologies to visualize the human body in 3D, platforms to teach chemistry in a fun way, equipment to reduce the use of laboratory animals, as well as ways to improve content teaching, are the winning education systems in the InnovaUNAM competition for teaching and learning the contents of practical approaches in sciences and humanities at a distance.

During the award ceremony held in the hall of the University Museum of Contemporary Art, the Secretary General of the National University, Leonardo Lomeli Vanegas, considered it important that the university makes an effort to communicate these innovations to all areas that can benefit from the use of these platforms, from academics to managers.

In order to innovate teaching at our university, absorb the learning that the pandemic leaves us with and be prepared to further promote distance education – and to respond to the challenges that a new health emergency may generate – it is essential that these initiatives be known and allowed to be known, Lumeli-Vanegas emphasized, before the Minister of Institutional Development, Patricia Dolores Davila Aranda, that we continue to stimulate its development.

Taking the floor, the Coordinator of Connectivity and Technology Transfer (CVTT) at UNAM, Jorge Vazquez Ramos, added that the pandemic showed that we were not prepared to teach in a similar situation, so it was necessary to think of new tools to modify the way content is taught and interaction with students in the future.

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“The projects presented are very innovative and educational. The idea of ​​the competition was born in the coordination of communication and in the face of emergency the need for innovation in teaching was understood. These projects make it possible to transfer knowledge to others, in addition to UNAM, public or private universities. We do not necessarily want them to buy them, but we want to We put this development in place, which is why it is licensed and protected.”

winners

José Luis Balderas López received an award for the Experimental Pharmacology Teaching Project without the Use of Animals. It is a platform that allows a pharmaceutical chemistry student to learn in a virtual way the interactions of molecules, without the need to use lab animals. The idea, he expressed, is to reduce them to a minimum in teaching, though they should still be in research.

Among other technologies is a 3D anatomical atlas with virtual reality for teaching and learning human anatomy and medical diagnosis using tomography images, a project promoted by Victor Hugo Ibarra Ramírez and Sergio Teodoro Vitella, who detail that the system has been tested since it was developed from It is accepted by medical students and is receiving great interest from other universities in Mexico and Latin America.

José Marco Antonio Franco Perez has been honored for developing the platform Students’ email structure, which focuses on teaching basic chemistry, and allows students to learn from theory and visualize molecules in three dimensions, either on a cell phone, tablet, or computer. Its main advantage, he specified, is that teachers, from the secondary level, can use it intuitively; It also attracts the attention of institutions in the United States.

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For the design of the MACTI platform: computational modeling and teaching, Luis Miguel de la Cruz Salas deserved the award, because his proposal allows, in a simple and dynamic way, to teach different contents from secondary school to postgraduate studies.

The winners received economic incentives and CVTT support to take their platforms to the next level of sophistication.

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