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Remember dissection in high school biology class? Thanks to Stanford researchers, dissecting a frog won't be such a smelly mess anymore, and frogs won't be in danger of ending their lives as class assignments. SUMMIT, the Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies Group, has begun to create virtual creatures, high-resolution computerized three-dimensional visualizations of actual organisms, to serve as educational tools for middle and high school students. With a click of a mouse, students can rotate the virtual frog to view it from any angle to study its external anatomy. Another click, and the skin will turn transparent. Click again, and the muscles peel back to show the internal organs and skeleton.
SUMMIT was founded eight years ago to create computer-based teaching tools for the School of Medicine, and the group has expanded to provide educational multimedia to middle and high school students. With a $500,000 seed grant from the National Science Foundation, Frog Island is the first in a series of projects to create a library of creatures from mice to grasshoppers for study by the denizens of biology labs. "The next big leap in education will come in virtual environments," said Parvati Dev, SUMMIT director. For more information visit the Virtual Creatures website at http://summit.stanford.edu/creatures.
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