DIGITAL
FROG DISSECTION

Topics: Compassion; Evangelism; Incarnation

References: Luke 10:30–37; Romans 10:14

Today high school students can get through biology class without smelling like formaldehyde. That’s because they can now dissect frogs digitally.

Digital Frog International Inc. sells an interactive CD-ROM for $170 that allows students to probe a croaker’s internal workings without lifting a scalpel. The impetus behind the digital frog program was company cofounder 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 more than nine hundred schools across North America are now making incisions into virtual frogs with a 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 virtual frogs are easily corrected, no real frogs are hurt, and, perhaps best of all, students don’t get their hands dirty. The whole procedure remains distant and antiseptic.

What is possible with biology is impossible with evangelism. We cannot do effective evangelism without touching the messy lives of sinners.

—J. Kent Edwards, “No Antiseptic Evangelism,” PreachingToday.com