Building the glycolisis and Krebs cycle as a puzzle: a strategy to learning metabolic pathways.

Resumo

First year physical  education  students must  understand metabolic  pathways to know how our body produces  energy  during  exercise  of different intensities and  rest.   However,  in a  first contact they usually complain about the difficulty to understand and visualize all the process such as the sequence of reactions,  the structure of the molecules and mainly what is changing in the molecule.  In an attempt to make easier the comprehension  of the metabolic  pathways we make a puzzle in a classroom where the  students have to build  the  glicolysis and  Krebs cycle through some clues given to guide them  to organize  the  sequence  of reactions.   For  this,  the  students were divided  in groups  of four and  each one received figures with  the  structural formula  of the  molecules and  their  names.  The  groups  that were changing  in the  structure were colored.  The  clues included  information such as the  compound that begins the pathway and its final product, number  and kind of enzymes involved, number  of ATPs produced,  reactions  with negative energy variation and number of compounds rich in energy produced. The students have no difficulty to visualize the structures or building these pathways. After that, they have some questions  to answer to see if they understand and learned the pathway. They reported that is easier  to  understand what  is changing  and  why,  making  the  comprehension  of what  is occurring during  exercise easier and have no difficulties to discuss and answer the questionnaire.