Abstract:

In the current school year, teaching at Slovak primary schools takes place in a combined form. The school management as well as the Ministry of Education approached the solution of the pandemic situation with COVID19 very sensitively and supported the classic full-time form of teaching. In some cases, based on a positive test result on Covid, it was necessary to temporarily exclude some full-time students. Pupils perceived the distance form of education differently. They mainly lacked social contacts as well as direct and lively teaching experiences. To revive teaching and increase its effectiveness, we use modern teaching aids and digital educational technologies, which have also proven themselves in the distance form of teaching. This may include the use of virtual laboratories, the implementation of laboratory experiments using visualized simulation models and environments. Although working in a virtual environment cannot completely replace real experiments and working with a real model, it can help to understand how the world around us works - to understand the essence of the phenomenon under study.

We wanted to allow students who could not be physically present at the class to at least virtually visit their school and classroom and actively participate in the class. Based on the positive experience from the chemical laboratory, which we have been using successfully for more than a year, we have recently focused on building a virtual computer laboratory. We have placed several "computer workstations" in the laboratory, which allow access to digitally processed thematic units from the subject of informatics/computing, which are included in the state educational program for primary schools. The individual thematic units are processed by different digital educational technologies and the technologies are often combined. Not only control questions are prepared for each thematic unit, but also interesting tasks that the student can solve by using the application. When using animation-simulation models, the student can observe and interactively change the conditions of the experiment, set the parameters to obtain the necessary results - solving the problem. The tasks that are given to students are focused on understanding and repeating the curriculum as well as fixing new knowledge.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, simulation models, simulation experiments, virtual parameter-driven experiments, setting experimental parameters.