Dissecting frogs online
The US Geological Survey Biological Resources Division has launched Frogwatch USA, a long-term frog and toad monitoring program meant to advocate conservation, gather data on frog and toad population distribution, and monitor wetlands.
This certain interest for the welfare of the said species bodes very well with a website called Virtual Frog Builder Game, wherein a digitized frog named Fluffy can be interactively dissected. With it, there would be no need to catch (and sadly, kill) so many frogs for science laboratory experiments.
The beginnings of Fluffy. The award-winning interactive program was made by computer scientists David Robertson, William Johnston and Wing Nip. It’s a fun and innovative way to discover the systems of a frog, which are so similar to ours.
In the website, students can find out how to change image size, or how to rotate the frog. Sophomores taking biology will surely enjoy removing and replacing virtual organs, and be able to see an organ's name and function.
There are form settings which control which frog parts are visible, and a “Skin” menu controls how much of the frog’s skin can be seen. Clicking on any part of the frog will yield a brief description of that part.
But to give one an idea as to how such an interactive program came about, the virtual kit started with two things already: masks representing each organ, and the computer codes needed for believable dissecting needed to perform the Dividing Cubes algorithm.
In a paper presented by Robertson, the “Whole Frog'' project had three main goals. First is to provide high school students with a chance to use virtual dissection tools to explore a frog’s anatomy. Second is to show how feasible it is to visualize interactively over the Web. And third is to show the possibilities of the World Wide Web.
Dissecting the page. The Virtual Frog Dissection kit uses the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) capability of WWW servers, which gives students or teachers interactive 3D visuals. Students can see the parts of the frog from a lot of different angles, and the ability to choose which parts of the anatomy can be seen or not. And the best part of it is, un-dissection becomes just as easy as dissection—all can be undone with just a click of the mouse.
For the 3D graphics that represent the internal parts of Fluffy, Robertson and company started by creating voxel data sets that can be used for surface or volume rendering software. Voxels are 3D small cubes, similar to pixels.
As a model, photographs of frog parts were digitized to represent the insides of the frog, some 10million small volume elements. The mask mentioned before isolates and identifies the structure, as detailed in the Whole Frog Technical Report.
With this information, the Web pages were made and designed to be used over low-bandwidth networks. A real accomplishment on the part of the makers is how an interactive 3D graphics program can be accessed over the Web without causing too much load
All these show that the Virtual Frog program is a great alternative to dissecting real frogs, and even adds new capabilities like un-dissection. How the organs are interdependent can be easily seen in different combinations that would not be quite so possible in real dissection. And students uncomfortable with dissecting an animal will not have to sacrifice a frog and cope with conflicting emotions.
The web page has an introductory page and two versions (one that can use image mapping or interactive images and another for browsers that cannot) of the interactive forms-based program. There are tutorials as well.
Through the wonders of the Internet, you and your students will have fun dissecting frogs online.
Sources:
Robertson, David, et.al. “Virtual Frog Dissection: Interactive 3D Graphics Via the Web.” Retrieved November 9, 2008 from
http://froggy.lbl.gov/papers/WWW.94/paper.html
“Virtual Frog Dissection Kit.” Retrieved November 9, 2008 from
http://froggy.lbl.gov/virtual/
(Published 24 November 2008, Smart Communications, Inc.)
