By Drs. Karen Pinder and Tamara Franz-Odendaal | September 2022

The first ever Histology Coloring book funded by a 2021 grant from the AAA Innovations Program to Drs. Karen Pinder (University of British Columbia) and Tamara Franz-Odendaal (Mount Saint Vincent University) is well underway. We are pleased to provide a brief update on what we have been doing and how the project has unfolded.

The Team

Early on in our discussions on developing this book, a decision was made to shift it to an online resource (rather than a printed book) with free downloadable pages for coloring.  To enable this shift, we next developed our table of contents, and hired a website designer to build our website – check us out at histologycoloringbook.com.  

For creation of the actual content (schematics), we are pleased to let AAA members know that we hired Dr. Mikaela Stiver (McGill University) to illustrate the coloring book. In addition, after an overwhelming response to our request for design contributors and reviewers, we have selected our teams. You may learn more about each team member on our website too. 

Our Progress

We are currently in the midst of creating and editing the schematics for this resource.  We are half-way there! Contributors are currently commenting on draft images behind a password protected webpage. Once this phase is done, then our reviewer team will provide additional comments and suggestions.

You Can Still Participate!

While we build this resource and in order to measure its impact, we are currently running a survey to assess how individuals learn histology and which aspects of histology they find challenging. We invite anyone who teaches histology (from anywhere in the world) to please complete the survey and share the survey link with their students. This data will form the baseline data to which we can compare survey results to be gathered after the launch of the Histology Coloring book.

We are super excited to be able to share this resource, once it is complete, with AAA members and others interested in learning about histology.