Better than the real thing?

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Is virtually dissecting a frog the same thing as actually dissecting a frog? No.

I encountered this very-well designed site today: http://www.froguts.com and was starting to write a “gee, that’s cool” blog post. But the more I played with the site, the more I thought, “um, no.”

1. The voice is computer generated. This is unnecessary and distracting.

2. The lesson is very guided and very structured. This is a good thing, but I think it hinders curiosity. I found myself wanting to poke under the organs and look under the eyelids as the program was explaining them. In normal dissections, I think there is a lab manual that kids follow.

3. You can’t easily move and zoom.  There is this gentle way of moving up, down, left, and right, but I want to zoom way in and move more quickly around my frog. Kind of linked to natural curiosity. 

4. Using the tools is kind of silly - “select the scalpel tool and cut along the thorax”  it’s artificial, and doesn’t fit the digital nature of the lesson. Why pretend to cut? I don’t think it adds anything to the process.

5. When the program asks you to find certain organs, the activity turns into a “find the thing to click on”.

6. The whole thing is kind of linear and “click to go forward”.  I felt like a kid could move forward through this with out any thinking.

7. Biology is gooey and messy. I think the problem of virtual dissections is students miss this aspect when doing it virtually.

If a school couldn’t afford real dissections, this would be great. But I am officially “meh” about this. 

What do you think of virtual dissections?

Here’s a great page with a bunch of virtual dissections on it (thank you Joan!)