Exploration simulations are generally designed so that the students can explore physical situations without necessarily being given information about the current scientific models used to explain them. For exploration to be effective students need carefully designed concrete explanation beforehand, and guided discussion of the model afterwards. Finally students must do applications of the model to complete the lesson. Exploration simulations should never give the explanations as part of the simulation, because they are the lab apparatus and not the curriculum.

This particular sequence or “Learning Cycle” was found by R. Karplus, A. Arons, A. Lawson and other researchers to be very effective. As a result I have designed the simulations to provide no guidance to the students in how they should be used. That guidance must be provided by the research based curriculum material. Essentially the students can use the simulations as labs and take data from them to build models of how the physical situation works.

What is the value of simulations? They can be used for remote learning where students have no physical access to apparatus. This can also be an aid for students who are sick or are temporarily unable to attend a lab. They remove some of the common sources of errors. One problem with physical experiments is that concrete operational students will often notice features of the data which come from statistical error and consider those features to be important data. For example wiggles in the data might be considered to be and indicator of higher speed or acceleration, and they will ignore the slope or value on the graph. Simulations can remove some of these distracters, and may help students build better understanding. Simulations can present physical situations in which the frictional force is exactly zero, while this can only be achieved in the lab by expensive air tracks and tables. Again, the presence of friction is something that formal operational students can easily mentally account for, but concrete operational and transitional students will have difficulty.

Simulations can also be valuable by making physical quantities visible. Research by Anton Lawson has found that even students at the formal operational level may have difficulty with concepts that involve processes and objects that you can not directly see or observe. This includes evolution, molecules, force, acceleration … He has proposed a level of thinking above the formal operational called the “theoretical level”. At that level students have minimal difficulty with unobservable quantities. Simulations can make such unobservable objects visible. For example students can actually “see” the action of the molecules, or they can see the arrows which represent force, velocity, or acceleration. They can be presented with examples of strobe or motion diagrams of the situation. All of these help the students build mental pictures and visualize the microscopic aspects of the physical situation.

The danger of simulations is that they can give too much information, and dampen the student’s ability to visualize. Students still must in the end be able to translate between written explanations, graphs, pictures, and equations. At that point if simulations are still being used, they must omit some of the helpful visualization features and require the students to provide them. The TESSI project by Janice Woodward found that students often prefer simulations initially, but as they gained experience they would switch to physical labs. This is possible evidence that simulations may be a good stepping stone on the way to having students work well with physical labs.