Abstract:

Computer-assisted teaching and learning have expanded greatly in the last few years. They have also been implemented very efficiently in our Physics course and laboratories, alongside the use of Internet. We have developed our own strategy to conduct laboratory work and study physics phenomena and laws based on the use of Adobe Flash and JavaScript programs. The computer simulations have been developed for our first-year students of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Building Services within the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Romania whose teaching languages are Romanian and English (RO+EN) and proved especially useful during the Covid-19 pandemic. These physics computer simulations turned out to be attractive for our students and enabled them to improve their skills when working in the physics laboratory and also they have been very effective tools for online learning, as they livened up the whole experience thanks to their friendly interfaces. Although all our teaching activities were transferred online during the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020, more precisely at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, our students worked efficiently for their laboratory activities due to the inclusion of seven computer simulations of laboratory works in the first-year undergraduate Physics curricula. Our students had at their disposal a virtual environment, the Virtual Physics Laboratory (VPL), that managed to replace quite successfully, though not optimally, the real work environment of the physics laboratory.
We made a statistical analysis of how performing teaching exclusively in the online environment influenced students’ performance. The usefulness of the Virtual Physics Laboratory (VPL) and of the online teaching method was reflected by our students’ final exam achievements, as 32 % of them improved their laboratory work grades compared to the previous academic year. This improved was achieved even though the students had to carry out their activity exclusively online on virtual platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, and collect experimental data, perform calculations and work in laboratory teams that did not interact physically and directly in the physics lab. As far as exam grades are concerned, this year’s results are comparable to those of the previous academic year, although there is a slight increase in the percentage of 7, 8 and 9 grades by 9 %, 12 % and 17 %, respectively.
Moreover, during the entire semester, a number of 269 students were asked after each Physics course if they preferred the online teaching method to the face-to-face one. On a scale of 1 to 5 (considering 1 for online courses and 5 for face-to-face courses) the analysis of the answers collected from students provided an average of the answers equal to (3.25±0.05), the percentage distribution of the answers being: 10.8% for 1, 9.9% for 2, 41.1% for 3, 19.6% for 4 and 18.6% for 5.

Keywords:

Computer simulations, Covid-19 pandemic, computer assisted instruction, teaching methods, Civil Engineering.