BeakerWare was formed as a way of sharing information about and distributing software for biologists, especially educational software. While it originated with a single author, we now market and distribute for an expanding list of software authors. BeakerWare also maintains the Biology Education Software FAQ.
Computers have invaded classrooms at all levels of education, but much of the software being written for teaching is pretty worthless. This is often because the authors of the software think in terms of old style teaching, or in terms of available tools for easily making software, and don't try to design programs that take advantage of what computers can do better than other modes of teaching. For instance, many authors are writing study-guides-on-CD type programs, where they take information that used to be found in a paper study guide (collections of multiple choice 'test' questions and some explanatory text) and put these into a program where the user can click around from one point to another and where the computer tells you how many questions you got wrong. This type of software can be useful, but its not really much of an improvement over the study guides that have existed for decades and is not really taking advantage of the computer as a unique teaching tool.
There are several classes of programs that do take advantage of the computer. These include simulation software which let students do experiments that would be too long, hard, or expensive for them to try otherwise. The best of these programs let students design their own experiments and learn important concepts by re-discovering them. These programs also enable students to practice the scientific method in a way that even wet biology laboratories don't always manage. Computers can also show animations of hard to describe processes and can serve as databases of information that students can easily access (including information not easily accessible outside the computer like 3-d configurations of molecules). All these types of software are opening up new ways of teaching and learning that were not available before computers.
Separating the good from the bad in educational software can be a lot of work. As an author and user of educational biology software for over 10 years (and the main author of this site), I've been interested in looking at the best of this software and thinking about what differentiates those programs as particularly useful. As part of this process, I and several others started writing descriptions and reviews of the software we looked at and liked. These are contained in the Biology Education Software FAQ, now published on this site by SnarkWare. In addition I've written a lot of software myself for teaching biology at the college level and I've collected the best of those programs and put them here. Among these programs is EcoBeaker, the premier software for classes in ecology, conservation biology, and evolution. BeakerWare is starting to distribute for other biology software authors as well. Check out a cute CD on keying out trees called Virtual Forest and a nice program on managing watersheds called The Carman Lake Project (with more coming soon - and if you write biology software and are looking for a distributor or just some advice, you should check us out). Finally, the site contains links to random fragments of code that I've written for research purposes which others might be interested in.
We welcome comments on this site, submissions of software to review, other authors who would like to distribute through BeakerWare (for free if your software is free, or for better terms than any book publisher will give you otherwise), or any other suggestions or questions. I hope you find our products and this site useful.
Eli Meir
University of Washington
meir@beakerware.org
Last updated 7 May, 2000