CellAtlas

Reviewer: Scotti-Lynn Moore

Developer: CellaVision

Operating systems: IOS, Android

Cost: Free

Version: 3.3

https://www.cellavision.com/en/cellavision-cellatlas 

About the App

CellAtlas is an app geared towards the medical laboratory sciences, focusing exclusively on hematology. Using the app, students can get refresher microlearning material on the properties of each type of blood cell (WBCs, RBCs, and Platelets) to help reinforce the course material and to quiz students on their speed and accuracy in cell recognition. This app is perfect for preparing for tests or even board certification exams. CellAtlas is a great app, in fact I have used it in the past when preparing for my boards!

Categorization and Learner Needs

According to the article Educational Apps Ontology, mobile apps can be broken down into a few categories and pedagogical design purposes pertaining to their individual purpose. In terms of broad categories, there are 3 main ones explored by the authors: instructive, manipulable, and constructive. Instructive apps focus on “drill-and- practice” where the learners are supposed to complete a standardized task, where there are predetermined “correct” answers. Manipulable apps focus on discovery and experimentation via guided inquiry—but once again, the outcome is predetermined. Constructive apps are “open-ended”, allowing the user to freely creative according to their preferences. Additionally, an app’s purpose can take on a few different forms, and thus be broken into 6 groups: Knowledge and Skill Building, Collaboration, Learning and Teaching Support, Communication, and Other Tools and Reference apps. Knowledge and Skill Building apps are the broadest in terms of uses—these apps consist of simple calculators to complex educational games which uses extrinsic motivators such as leveling up, points, and high scores to increase engagement. “They most likely address the first two levels from the bloom taxonomy: Remember (identify, recall) and Understand (compare, match, classify)” (Notari et al., 2016). Collaborative apps include learners working as a group to create something, such as the Google Doc app. Learning and Teaching Support apps use the learner-provided content to help them learn using a built-in learning strategy, i.e., flashcards, homework scheduling, etc. Communication apps focus exclusively on providing a conduit for ease of communication, i.e., Slack. These apps are extremely useful in learning environments as they help the learner to ask questions and receive feedback in a timely manner. Finally, Other tools and reference apps are just that—tools and references to aid in the learning process, i.e., calculators, maps, etc.

Using these definitions, the CellAtlas app would be classified as an instructive app as its purpose is to be a knowledge and skill building app. This is evident by the fact that its main function is to help the user to learn how to identify peripheral blood cells with speed and accuracy—the user can read up on each cell’s physical characteristics and clinical significance, then test their knowledge by quizzing themselves to see how many correct cell identifications they can make before the clock counts down. The app itself provides the crucial knowledgebase, the learner advances their understanding through drill and practice learning strategies.

In comparing to the Learner’s Needs (Notari et al., 2016), CellAtlas helps learners within the Cognitive domain, specifically through “get help from experts” as hematology experts from around the world contributed to the app content development, “think independently” as learners are able to use a typical physical cell’s characteristics to identify abnormal cells, and “process new information” to learn more details on each cell type as needed.

Other Related Pedagogical Themes

CellAtlas displays familiar educational elements, such as those in the RASE framework (Churchill et al., 2016). As discussed in the article Framework for designing mobile environments, RASE offers a fairly comprehensive educational framework through its multipronged approach–leveraging Resources, Activity, Support, and Evaluation. This app provides the resources learners need in the form of scientifically accurate content on each type of cell, including differentiating characteristics and its clinical significance, which has had hematology expert contribution. The activity and evaluation are achieved through the quizzing feature and subsequent quiz score. The support comes from the incorporated blog and videos.

Conclusions

I have personally benefited from using this as I was not only completing my hematology class where we had to regularly perform WBC (white blood cell) differentials in increasing complexity to me preparing to take my certification boards. The app uses a variety of images, which adds to the “drill-and-practice” value proposition, as the images become more and more atypical and the quiz adapts to your identification weaknesses. Overall, it’s a great app for students and professionals in the health sciences who need more practice or even just a refresher to be competent in the hematology lab.

Resources

Notari, M. P., Hielscher, M., & King, M. (2016). Educational apps ontology. In D. Churchill, J. Lu, T. Chiu, & B. Fox (Eds.), Mobile learning design (pp. 83–96). Singapore: Springer.

Churchill, D., Fox, B., & King, M. (2016). Framework for designing mobile learning environments. In D. Churchill, J. Lu, T. Chiu, & B. Fox (Eds.), Mobile learning design: Theories and applications (pp. 3–25). Springer.

Image Credits: https://www.cellavision.com/en/cellavision-cellatlas