Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
scientists use. In testimonials, participating students cited more engagement while running experiments, along with relief that they could perform lab activities at their own pace.
Relevance for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
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environments in which high school students can approach chemistry more like practicing scientists: go.nmc.org/chem. > Marine Biology. In the Swedish town of Lysekil, high school students used virtual tools to explore
Virtual and remote laboratories reflect the current trend in K-12 education toward more authentic online education. Though the technology is four to five years away from mainstream use in schools, there are already many clear benefits of implementation. Virtual and remote labs offer flexibility, as students can run experiments as many times as they like — both in and outside of school.
Virtual and remote labs are often spoken of together as they both address the challenge of increasing access to authentic science.
Because these labs are designed to allow easy repetition of experiments, there is less pressure on students to execute perfectly the first time. After learning what did not work, they can easily make adjustments to their processes and get different results. In the controlled environments of virtual and remote laboratories, students are safe, even if they make an error.
the marine environment of the Gullmar Fjord on the Swedish west coast, learning in the process how scientific knowledge is created. The students used a virtual ocean acidification laboratory to conduct studies on acidification of the marine environment: go.nmc.org/mar.
Most remote or virtual labs are currently either the result of high profile, well-funded collaborations, large grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation in the U.S., or targeted efforts by not-for-profit organizations. The American Chemical Society, for example, created a set of virtual activities for high school students. Resources such as the Molecular Workbench enable students to explore physics, chemistry, and biology through hundreds of simulations. go.nmc.org/chems As K-12 continues to embrace online learning over the next several years, it is easy to imagine online schools that rely on virtual and remote laboratories for much of their STEM labs and activities. A sampling of applications for virtual and remote laboratories across disciplines includes the following: > Chemistry. Dr. David Yaron, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, developed ChemCollective, a project in the National Science Digital Library, to create flexible interactive learning
> Mathematics. High school students in four rural North Carolina school districts are using Geometer’s Sketchpad to understand how theorems are developed. The software is accessed through North Carolina State University’s virtual computing lab, a cloud-based learning environment with an interactive online community where teachers share tips on the software as well as their projects: go.nmc. org/nsf.
Virtual and Remote Laboratories in Practice
The following links provide examples of virtual and remote laboratories in use that have direct implications for K-12 settings: Drosophila Virtual Lab go.nmc.org/flies In this biology-based virtual lab, students engage in experiments with digital fruit flies to determine which specific traits are passed onto offspring. In addition to the laboratory activities, the site hosts quizzes, reports, and surveys.