INITIAL EXPERIENCES OF CREATING MULTIMEDIA COMPUTER-SIMULATIONS TO REPLACE PHARMACOLOGY PRACTICALS

The replacement of traditional practicals by CAL simulations was promp ted by a combination of economic factors, a decreased level of technic al support and the requirement for a large capital investment to repla ce old and broken equipment. In an economic climate which promised onl y further increases in the number of undergraduates and no assured com mensurate increase in resources, CAL appeared to be a possible alterna tive (Brown et al, 1988). Our only previous attempt to produce our own CAL package had been written in Turbo Basic on a 286 PC. It had invol ved considerable time and effort and the results were not particularly realistic. The increase in computing power offered by the 486 series of PCs, availability of low cost sound and video capture expansion car ds, and the emergence of authoring systems, such as Toolbook, Hypercar d and Authorware, appeared to provide an opportunity to produce better simulations (Purcell, 1993; Hartley, 1993).