Biointeractive

Today I looked at the Biointeractive Database. This database is a collection of information over 14 scientific topics. There are videos, animations, interactive activities, printable articles and more over each topic. Some of the topics include Infectious Disease, Biological Clocks, and Stem Cell reasearch. I looked up the Neuroscience Videos. There were probably 20 videos that covered that topic and they were all fairly short. I think this is nice because you can easily watch one video to the next without being overwhelmed by a ten minute video. The videos are done from experiments or lectures or scientific research. They are really interesting. The animation section is also really neat. Its kind of like afancy slide show. I watched one about the location of the hypothalamus that was only about twenty seconds that was a professor lecturing and then showing animation about where the hypothalumus is in mice. There are also click and learn Interactive pages where you can look at slides and answer questions. The coolest thing about this site is the Virtual Lab. There is an actual lab that is set up where users can go and virtually cultivate bacteria or inject flies. The lab gives you step by step procedures to follow and tells you why and what is happening in each step. I think this would be really great for elementary and middle school age students. It would give them an idea of what happens in real scientific labs. I thought it was pretty interesting. This database is really fun and it seems really high tech and fancy which just adds to its fun-ness.