(1) What is in this FAQ?

Who is B.E.S.T.

B.E.S.T. stands for Biology Education Software Taskforce of the University of Washington. This is not quite as official as that title makes us sound, but the group did quite a bit of work looking at educational software for use in the biology classes here at UW. The group started out composed of several graduate students and PhDs from the Department of Zoology at the UW. Recently, however, B.E.S.T. has consisted mainly of one person, Eli Meir, and I am the one currently doing all the reviews and maintaining this site. In addition to gathering software, we have run classes here examining biology education software, have invited notable people in the field to come and speak at our departmental seminars. Among the other people originally involved in the group were Adrian Sun, George Gilchrist, Tarif Awad, Creagh Bruener, David Baldwin, and Kevin Obrien. When a review contains some initials after it, those initials indicate which person wrote the review (reviews without initials were written by me).

I am not claiming to be especially knowledgable or gifted when it comes to educational software, nor are I claiming to be speaking from years of teaching experience in using computers in education.While I have taught using several of the programs listed below, my main experience is as an author of educational software in fields ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology to, most recently, ecology and conservation biology. Based on this, I aim to present what I think are the most useful pieces of software for undergraduate education in various branches of biology. I hope this will provide a starting point for instructors in other universities who are looking for good software to use in their classes.

Where to address comments, queries, etc..

You can get in touch with me by emailing to meir@u.washington.edu. You can also get me through snail mail by sending to

How I picked software to include here

There is a lot of "educational" software out there which is not very interesting. I did not want to include all of that in this list, so I have weeded out a lot of software. This weeding is obviously subjective. What one person considers junk might be exactly what another person is interested in. Originally I was going to spell out these biases in this FAQ, but due to lack of time, here is a quick summary. If you want a more detailed description of my biases, see an article I wrote in the July 1998 issue of Integrative Biology.

First of all, anything that did not work on a reasonably new computer and operating system was excluded. I also excluded most software which did not run on a Macintosh or Windows machine, since that is what most students and teachers have access to. Secondly, I have a bias against software which puts a textbook or a study guide onto the computer and claims that just the fact its on a computer screen makes it somehow superior. I also did not particularly like most software whose only innovation was a bit of hypertext capability (ie - click on a word, it gives you a definition of the word or takes you somewhere else in the document). I do like software that uses the computer to do things which would be hard or impossible to do on paper. I especially like simulations and other programs which let a student perform experiments.

I've noticed that over the 5 years that I've been maintaining these pages, the quality of software I've been sent has gone up. So I think that authors of educational software are getting more sophisticated, and we're heading towards having more and more useful teaching software in many fields of biology.

What information I include about each piece of software I review

I have tried to write three paragraphs about each piece of software. The first paragraph gives a description of what the software does. The second paragraph is a short review of the software. The third paragraph gives information on how to get the software, and approximate price range if I know it. In the price range, Free means free, Low means $100 or less, and High means more than $100. These are by no means gauranteed to be accurate.

I have NOT class tested most of this software, so the reviews are based on my impressions as a former student and a teacher. Because of this lack of class testing, I have limited each review to a single short paragraph which states what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of the package, and my gut feeling about how useful I think it is. I hope that this short review will help users of this document to decide what software they are interesting in looking for on their own, but I do not intend it as an authoritative statement on the value of the software. Also note that I have in essence given favorable reviews to all software included here, since quite a bit of software was left off this list.

If someone other than the author of this FAQ contributed to a review, their initials are given next to the software title.

How to submit software for inclusion on this list

I welcome new software, and will be happy to include it in the list if it meets our criteria as discussed above. However, there are a couple conditions.

(I) I will only accept software for review from the authors or publishers of the software, or on an original store-bought disk with the manual. This does not mean that others cannot tell me about software they have used and liked. I really want to hear about software from everyone, and if you inform me of a piece of software and tell me how to get ahold of it, I will (eventually) do my best to get a copy and look at it. However, to protect me from copyright problems, virus problems, etc., I would rather only receive software from the actual authors, or from anonymous ftp sites if the software is in the public domain. In many cases, this meant that I have reviewed demo versions of software instead of the full package (since I have no budget to do these reviews).

(II) I prefer reviewing real copies of a piece of software, rather than a demo version, and if I have only seen a demo version then I will mention this in our review.

The best way to get me software is either to give me a web page where I can download it, or to send it to me by regular mail at the address above. If your software is not too big, you can also attach it to an email. But if its more than a couple megabytes, please warn me in advance.

How to Submit a Review that You've Written

I wouldwelcome help with reviewing software. To submit a review of something that I haven't reviewed, simply write it in the same form as all the other reviews here and email it to me, along with your qualifications to be doing a review (they don't have to be very high, as you can tell from above). Of course I'd appreciate it if people didn't review their own or their friends software...

Last update 28th of February, 1999