Many microbiology laboratory courses use the identification of an unknown culture as an exercise to teach students about the types of characteristics that are used to distinguish bacterial species. This is insufficient for them to learn the deductive reasoning skills involved in bacterial identification.
Students select the test from a pull-down menu.
The student must interpret this result. When sufficient information has been collected, the student can choose to identify the unknown strain. An audit trail of the student's choices can be saved to disk and evaluated by the instructor. The multi-windowing environment allow students to learn in a nonlinear fashion. The main test window is supported by two help windows.