BeakerWare.com Software for Biologists and Biology Teachers.
Title
WELCOME TO BEAKERWARE
Description
Who is BeakerWare
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.
Contact
- Meir, Eli
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- Ithaca NY
- United States 14850
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- 617 812 0093
