[Note that I have only seen a demo of this program]

This is a series of animations designed to be used while lecturing in a classroom on topics in physiology and neurophysiology. The animations range from showing the blood flow and pacemaker activity in a beating heart, to showing the action of a synapse at different scales, to simpler animations such as one accompanying the beating heart section which shows a fluid moving faster through a wide pipe than through a narrow pipe arranged parallel to it. The animations are line drawings and filled areas of the kind you would do in a drawing program, with snippets of text for labels and explanations, and lots of colors to distinguish different parts of each picture. Although you can change the size of the animations, they look best at 320 by 200 pixels (about half the size of your typical 12' monitor).

The animation viewer supplied for the Macintosh is very clumsy. To adjust the speed of the animation you must go through a cryptic dialog box (and then start over at the beginning of the animation), and there is no way that I could find to go backwards, freeze a frame, or skip to a certain section of the animation. I also had a few minor problems getting the program to run - in general the viewer was not so friendly. This is too bad because the animations themselves are pretty nice. They are simple enough that an instructor should be able to show them in class and quickly explain all the parts, yet they include important details, and are nicely colored to make them attractive. They also make nice use of special effects, such as zooming in closer and closer onto some process to show it at different scales. Thus, with a better program for viewing the files I could see these animations being quite useful in demonstrating processes that are inherantly dynamic during a lecture, although before you buy you should make sure you like the animations they have for the particular processes you're interested in. Also, make sure you have a way to project a small picture on a computer screen so your whole class can see it.

Computer: DOS, Windows, Macintosh

Source: Didactic Systems, 2756 Hartwood Cir, Stow, OH 44224, (216) 673-4066 tjt@neoucom.edu
Demo available.

Cost: High

Last update 22nd of January 1996