A Teaching Tool for Parasitology: Enhancing Learning with Annotation and Image Retrieval

Parasitology is a basic course in life sciences curricula, but up to now it has few computer-assisted teaching tools. We present SuperIDR, a tool which supports annotation and search (based on a textual and a visual description) in the biodiversity domain. In addition, it provides a feature to aid comparison of morphological characteristics among different species. Preliminary results with two experiments show that students found the tool to be very useful, contributing to an alternative learning approach.