Virtual experimental activities: a new approach

Abstract

Abstract Nowadays, students have digital skills that are much larger than any other student in the past. Traditional experiments in a real laboratory are still fundamental, however an increasing number of computers can be used to simulate experiments close to the experimental environment. This can be seen as a great advantage for science learning, as students are more involved with various contexts that are freely available in digital resources but are difficult or not easily reproduced in the real laboratory. In this study we present a new perspective for pedagogical computational simulations to complement and/or support experimental activities at school. We call these simulations virtual experimental activities (VEAs). These are virtual environments that simulate real complex physical phenomena, to be studied by the user (student) from an investigational perspective. With VEAs, teachers can help students develop skills in terms of experimental research and extend the experimental activity beyond the laboratory class. Almost all experimental features and skills can be trained with this type of simulation, except for physical dexterity with real instruments and experimental sets. To complement our exposition, we present a simple VEA as an example to show how it can be used at school.