Abstract:

Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an essential part of our daily lives. Education at any level is strongly influenced by them nowadays as well. ICT not only automate organizational business processes within educational institutions, but have a great impact on the content and methodology of teaching. One of the approaches that employ ICT in teaching and learning is application of various software for visualization and simulation of studied processes and phenomena. Thus, within this approach virtual laboratories come to the forefront. They can be applied in different courses, such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc, to conduct virtual experiments, if, for example, the real equipment is unavailable for some reason, or experiments due to their nature cannot be performed within university labs.

This paper presents the results of the development of a virtual simulator of the scanning electron microscope Quanta 3D 200i created in the International Information Technology University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) at the Computer Engineering and Telecommunication Department. Such simulators can be considered as an example of virtual laboratories. The application is designed to teach undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers how to work with such scanning electron microscope. In the article the components of the real microscope are explained and the related works are presented. The choice of the development platform is justified and the functionality and the structure of the virtual simulator of the scanning electron microscope are described.

Keywords:

Simulator, nanotechnology, scanning electron microscope, Unity 3D.