Abstract:

The evolution of technology in the last decades has produced a diversity of resources for teaching scientific disciplines in secondary education. However, these resources don't seem to reach the classrooms and instructors do not take advantage of them as much as it could be desirable. In this context, we carry out a systematic search in order to identify physics and/or chemistry simulators and virtual laboratories (referred as resources from now on), available on the internet. The resources collected from this search are compiled into an open database and initial analyses are performed. The search query is conducted in general web search engines using a selection of keywords. The first one-hundred results from each search engine are analyzed. The inclusion criteria consider the reference to simulators and virtual laboratories, about physics or chemistry, and provided to be used in secondary education (grades 7-12). Only the resources that run in HTML5 are fed into the database. All the resources have been checked and information on different fields have been collected, for instance web address, topics to which they refer, courses in which they could be used, language and date of last update. A total of 1776 resources have been collected, of which 73 % belong to physics and 27 % to chemistry. The most observed topics are mechanics (566, 32 %), electricity and magnetism (267, 15 %) and matter and reactions (194, 11 %). The topics with less resources are organic chemistry (25, 1 %), elements ( 29, 2 %) and modern physics (55, 3 %). Approximately 2 % of resources can also be used offline. In terms of language, they are mainly presented in English (82 %). Only 1 % of the resources are usable in the 1st ESO (grade 7); approximately 25 % would be suitable for the 2nd ESO (grade 8); 12 % would fit in 3rd ESO (grade 9) and 62 % in 4th ESO (grade 10). 75 % of the resources analyzed could be used in 1st Baccalaureate (grade 11) and 76 % in 2nd Baccalaureate (grade 12). This research confirms the availability of a large set of simulations and virtual laboratories for chemistry and physics education at the secondary level. The database of the resources will be available to instructors and we hope this work will facilitate its reuse.

Keywords:

Simulator, Education, Virtual Laboratory, Chemistry Education, Physics Education, Secondary education.