• Cost savings in not needing expensive equipment, especially for items like air tracks
• Time savings in setting up and breaking down equipment, especially if teachers are floating from classroom to classroom
• No safety concerns for students handling dangerous equipment
• Allows students to make up missed labs especially after an extended absence

In this simulation, students drop balls of different materials down a tube, triggering two photo-gates attached to a timer. After moving the bottom photo-gate, they measure the time at several distances along the tube and can calculate the final velocity at these locations. By making a graph of velocity versus time, they can see how the balls approach a terminal velocity.

The one down side to computer based labs, is that the students may miss the hands on aspect of the lab. In this lab, every attempt has been made to make the simulation and taking of data as realistic as possible. Students must drag and drop each ball, being careful not to break the top photo-gate, not drop the ball too far above the tube, and not hit the sides of the tube. They must align the ball in both directions by using the mouse and the arrow keys.

One school designed a similar lab using long glass tubes so that the distances could be measured and drawn on the sides of the tube and to shield the balls from air currents. It took a long time to set up the lab because of the difficulty of aligning the tube and the photo-gates. The metal balls sometimes bounced off of the table and broke the bottom of the glass tubes. The photo-gates did not always register when plastic tubes were substitued for the glass tubes. And finally, the results were often very poor unless students were very dilligent in dropping the balls close to the top of the tube.

With the computer based lab, there were none of these problems. Students still had to be very diligent in taking their data, but if they were not, they got immediate feedback on what they were doing wrong. Students spent less time setting up the equipment, about the same time taking the data, and had more time to graph and analyze the data.

Physics

• Vector MONSTER Lab

Chemistry

• The Ritzytown Water Projects - An Interactive Learning Experience On Acids & Bases
• Chemistry Games, Labs, & Demos