Today, thanks to a small Canadian software company, high school students can get through biology class without smelling like formaldehyde. While students of old may have had to dissect frogs to earn a science credit, today’s teen can opt for a bloodless alternative: the digital frog.
Digital Frog International Inc. sells an interactive online program for $85.00 that allows students to probe a tiny croaker’s internal workings without ever lifting a scalpel. The impetus behind the digital frog program was company co-founder Simon Clark’s squeamishness over cutting critters as a veterinarian student. Clark disliked dissection so much that he decided to find a less distasteful way to teach students anatomy and physiology.
Thanks to this program, students in schools across North America are now making incisions into virtual frogs with their computer mouse. Throughout the virtual dissection the computer program’s speech component explains various organ functions while the program’s three-dimensional animation allows the user to add cartilage and muscle to the frog’s skeleton and get a beneath-the-skin view of how the amphibian moves.
The advantages of using this program are obvious: mistakes made on a virtual frogs are easily corrected, no real frogs are hurt, and, perhaps best of all, students don’t have to get their hands dirty. The whole procedure remains distant and antiseptic.
But what may be possible with biology is impossible with evangelism. We cannot do effective evangelism without touching the lives of sinners.