About This Activity
"This is a Spark Lab Research Stream course and it is recommended that students have a minimum overall average of 85%-90%. Are you curious about how medications are discovered, produced, and how they work in our bodies? In the Pharmaceutical Chemistry course, you will learn answers to these and many other interesting questions about common medicines like Tylenol or Pepto Bismol and more complex drugs that treat heart disease, cancer, and viral and bacterial infections. In addition to classroom lectures and discussions of these topics, students partaking in the course will gain hands-on experience working with several drugs in a chemical laboratory performing their synthesis and analysis. Students will also explore the structure of the drugs and how they interact with their targets using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. By the end of the course, the participants will have learned several interesting examples, methods and techniques used in modern pharmaceutical chemistry and have learned the foundations of drug action in the human body. About the Instructors: Chemistry Professors Kyle Belozerov and Derek Jackson have won a provincial honour for innovative teaching: the Minister’s Award of Excellence in the Future-Proofing Ontario’s Students, which recognizes faculty and staff who have led the way in adapting programs that support new ways of learning. They received the award for their work with virtual reality (VR) in chemistry courses. Motivated by the desire to help students learn the structure and behavior of complex molecules, the team leveraged the unique capabilities of VR to teach students about these molecules in a completely new, immersive and engaging, as well as accessible and equitable, way. The team developed a variety of interactive VR activities designed to help students manipulate molecules and research crucial aspects of the structure underlying their reactivity and biological function.
Map & Direction
York University Keele Campus
•
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON, Canada
M3J 1P3
Get Directions
Discuss This Activity