XVI International Botanical Congess

Students frequently experience difficulty with plant life cycles, and in understanding which structures produce or give rise to which other structures. Concepts such as egg withinarchegonium within megagametophyte within ovule can be clarified by the use of color-coded Venn diagrams. PowerPoint allows these diagrams to be used as an animated series, in which the student can proceed at her or his own pace. Particularly with the use of imported illustrations, PowerPoint animations can illustrate processes as diverse as transcription and ecologicalsuccession. These animations, which can have dozens of frames, allow a greater number of steps to be illustrated than would be possible in any static textbook diagram.