Every year, when I teach electric circuits and Kirchoff's Laws, my students struggle through the labs. Setting up involved circuits is time-consuming and takes a lot of attention to detail. When my students are doing these labs, I am on my feet more than usual, trouble-shooting poor connections and re-teaching each group how to use the multimeter they did just fine with yesterday. As a result, these labs have much less content than I would like to include and I find those days exhausting. For certain pieces, I don't even attempt a lab and just tell the students what would happen, then have them do problems.
One alternative I've been considering is to have students use a circuit-building simulation to expedite the process. Like most science teachers, I tend to assume that a real-world, hands-on activity is better than anything a computer can do, but the draw of simply dragging a cursor to connect circuit elements rather than connecting alligator clips and praying that nothing in the rat's nest of wires most students manage to produce comes loose is too much to resist.
This assignment seemed like an excellent opportunity to read some of the research on using simulations to teach science. I set out partly to reassure myself that simulations can be effective teaching tools and partly to find out what is currently known about how to make the best use of simulations. What are simulations good at teaching? What makes a good simulation vs. a bad one? After reading several papers on the topic, I feel like I have some ideas for how to design effective activities with a simulation and the confidence that simulations can serve an important role in science classrooms.
Research in Educational Technology
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