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University pioneers online science experiments
| Publish date | 2008-07-25 |
| Available Articles | Full articles without membership |
The Open University has developed an innovative way of enabling distance learners to participate in scientific experiments remotely.
Interactive screen experiments (ISEs) use Flash technology to allow students to carry out a real experiment using a standard home computer and web browser. They are to be introduced for science students on Open University courses this year.
The university hopes that the technology will be of particular benefit to disabled students who can’t work in a laboratory, and students from developing countries where well-equipped teaching laboratories are in short supply.
An ISE consists of many hundreds of photographs of an actual laboratory experiment designed to capture all possible states of the apparatus.
Dr Paul Hatherly of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the university explained how the experiments work.
He said: “It’s a kind of highly interactive movie where the student can control the development of the plot. ISEs are real experiments showing real phenomena. They are not simulations of what someone thinks you should see.”
In a simulated experiment the computer predicts the outcome using a mathematical model and generates the appropriate images. In an ISE there is no model – the student influences the course of an actual experiment.
Dr Hatherly has been developing the ISEs with Dr John Macdonald, of the University of Reading, as part of the piCETL collaboration led by The Open University.
In the first ISE, a home experiment for students on the OU’s Exploring Science course, students will be able to measure diffraction angles of emission lines from a low-energy light bulb.
They can move the equipment on screen, view the diffracted image, align the spectrum with the scale on a protractor and measure the angles.
Dr Macdonald and Dr Hatherly are now working on ISEs in radioactivity and spectroscopy that will be introduced at OU residential schools in Edinburgh and Brighton this summer. There are also plans to use ISEs in a new course on experimental design.
While ISEs are well suited to the OU’s distance learning students, Dr Hatherly stressed that they are not intended to replace hands-on experiments but rather to augment them.
In a conventional university ISEs can help students practice skills in their own time and learn to use a piece of apparatus before they enter the laboratory.
ISEs can also be used with equipment that is too expensive, scarce or dangerous for students to handle themselves. They may also have applications in industrial training such as the operation of a nuclear power station.
“Although the first experiments have been in physics there is no reason why the concept should not be extended to other science disciplines and even to the humanities,” Dr Hatherly added.
Keywords: distance learning, disabilities, developing countries.
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