A.D.A.M. The Inside Story is a hybrid multimedia CD‐ROM that explores the human anatomy. It installs very easily on Windows, Windows 95, or Macintosh computers. The main menu offers four options: Anatomy, Family Scrapbook, Animations, and Quit. The Anatomy option is the most important one and provides access to the other three.
The Anatomy option shows all anatomical systems for the male and female body. A “navigator” graphic in the upper left corner shows a body that serves as a navigation tool and controls what appears in the contents area, the main viewing area. You can view the body in general or focus on specific parts, in which case, what you view in the contents area will appear in greater detail. By moving the frame around the graphic in the navigator, you can view different portions of the anatomy in more detail. A magnify icon lets you move over the contents area to view structures in even greater detail.
A skin tone icon lets you choose skin tone and corresponding facial features for a white, black, Asian, or Hispanic person. You can examine the anatomy from an anterior (front), medial (left inside), lateral (right side), or posterior (back) view. A “depth bar” along the right side of the screen lets you remove or restore up to 62 layers. This bar allows you penetrate the body in much greater detail.
You can select to view the male or the female body and select a modesty level, i.e. whether or not to display fig leaves. Parents can choose to have the genitals and female breasts covered for an individual session or permanently. This also prevents access to the sections that deal with the reproductive system. The instruction brochure that comes in the inside cover of the jewel case explains how to lock the modesty setting. The page has a dotted line along the inside edge so parents can cut it out of the booklet so children don’t learn how to reverse a parental decision.
A.D.A.M. The Inside Story lets you view the full anatomy or individual systems. Moving the cursor over a bodily structure and clicking it will identify the structure and offer to pronounce it. When looking at individual systems, the skin tone button changes to a label button that lets you display identifying labels in the contents area. A status bar at the bottom of the screen also identifies the current structure and lets you choose another. Clicking on this bar will display an alphabetic list of 109 structures. You can also click the Find icon to search for a particular structure. Clicking on the Highlight button will accent a structure by dimming the surrounding ones — a very useful feature for a student.
A web link button accesses A.D.A.M.’s Internet site to download more information.This button also provides access to the A.D.A.M. Medical Directory, a database of more than 100 top medical and health‐related web sites. This feature requires a modem and an Internet connection. If you do not have an Internet browser you may install the Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 from the CD‐ROM. A 3‐D button accesses three dimensional anatomical models of the heart, respiratory system, and skull. You can run an animation that rotates the structure or you can identify individual parts by selecting a name. This will display a definition of the structure and rotate the image to bring it into full view. It doesn’t put a label on it, however. A compass‐type dial lets you select an arrow to rotate the structure in any way you desire to view the structure from the best angle.
The family scrapbook, accessible from the opening screen or from the scrapbook button in the anatomy option, contains narrated discussions and animations of the body’s various systems. Here, Adam and Eve include some humor in their narrations to entertain as they teach.
An Explore menu provides access to activities that include games and puzzles, a glossary, pronunciations, animations, images, interactive quizzes, and reference texts on each system.
Loading animations, images, and activities can sometimes be slow. You can improve performance by choosing the Complete Install option. This copies all the multimedia resources (animations, anatomy images, etc.) to the hard drive, which retrieves information much faster than a CD‐ROM drive. However, the complete install option requires about 600 MB of hard disk space.
You can also improve the definition of the images, animations, and videos by increasing the color depth of the video display from 256 colors (if your system can display more than 256 colors) to high color (thousands or millions of colors). However, under the high color setting, images and animations will take a little longer to start and to run.
A text file on the CD includes a wealth of troubleshooting information, along with hardware manufacturers’ phone, fax, BBS, and tech support numbers and e‐mail addresses. The online help features provide tutorials on how to use the product and a variety of avenues to solve problems.
A.D.A.M. The Inside Story is a well‐integrated title. It uses multimedia well and provides a wealth of information. It is easy to use and offers many different ways and levels to study human anatomy. Highly recommended
