Abstract:

The Scientific Degree Plan (PLS) is Italian intervention plan focused at orientation, teaching and training actions that are directed at high school students, universities, and teachers.
The PLS is organized into National Disciplinary Projects: Biology and Biotechnology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology,
Computer Science, Mathematics, Natural and Environmental Sciences, Materials Science, Statistics.
At the Federico II University of Naples, 8 of the 9 national projects are active (PLS-UNINA) and every year, as part of the activities of each of them, many activities are launched for students and teachers from Campania and beyond, among them the second edition of PLS Virtual Summer School for Students (PVS3).
The PVS3 will be directed at students attending the last two years of secondary schools who wish to deepen their knowledge of the subjects of the scientific area, going beyond the aspects usually dealt with in the course of school activities.
The activities, including highly interdisciplinary virtual lessons and laboratories, will take place from 6th to 10th September 2021 on the Microsoft Teams.
A positive side of this pandemic is that it has exposed people to new technologies developed over the past decade.
Since March 2020, university professors teaching science subjects requiring lab work, such as biology, had to become particularly creative and had to adapt their courses and structures to the online synchronous format. Due to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic- which incidentally coincided with the beginning of my molecular biology academic course -it was impossible to carry out any activity in person, because all the teachers and all the students could not access the classrooms and the educational laboratories. To give a sense of continuity and normality to my students, I started documenting and learning myself, choosing and using some new technologies, in order to provide to my students a suitable alternative to face-to-face lab activities.
The first solutions adopted were Science Education Resources at “Jove.com” (ICERI, 2020) and later “Labster.com”, an application that offers virtual laboratory simulations whose use license was offered free of charge for over six months.
With Labster.com, in a risk-free simulated learning environment, the students performed experiments interacting with the laboratory equipment, and repeated the actvities as many times as they wanted to improve their learning.
Based on this experience, from now on I will divide PLS summer school students into smaller groups since working groups help build friendships which is a component of the traditional lab experience. Moreover, the English language of the virtual laboratory simulations will be an additional value and a different learning context useful to potentiate the learning also of foreign language and an inclusive experience in learning key science concepts.
In conclusion, although it is difficult to replace the "hands-on" experience of a real laboratory environment, the very positive in silico experience with my students will be adapted in the near future to PVS3 2021 edition (www.pls.unina.it), by overturning the theoretical lessons into synchronous virtual simulations that shall be the basis for new creative activities that students will be able to carry out in the future with greater mastery and safety in a real laboratory with teachers of the high school science laboratories. Protocols for new activities will be one of the expected results.

Keywords:

Virtual lab simulation, Epigenetic and Diet, 3D DNA model cut and paste.