Laboratory education virtualization (LABOVIR)

Overview

We aim to deepen the students’ understanding of practical laboratory work and chemical phenomena by utilizing virtual learning environments. LABOVIR is a programme-level activity at CHEM, aiming to complement our practical laboratory teaching at all levels of education.

Virtual laboratories are a very strong emerging trend in education of science and engineering (V. Potkonjak et al., Virtual laboratories for education in science, technology, and engineering: A review, Computers & Education, 2016, 95, 309-327, DOI). They offer numerous benefits to complement and surpass the traditional laboratory training:

• Learning events can be executed anytime, providing the flexibility (both time and place-wise) for learning, even before coming to Aalto.
• Student can revisit the activities as many times as he/she wants, easing the stress often familiar with the exams. We also believe, this type of teaching will further reduce the surface learning but instead, enhances the deeper intake of laboratory practices.
• Doing the exercises in a virtual environment instead of just reading lecture notes and looking pictures will help associating the problems to real laboratory space.
• Activities at a virtual laboratory can be combined with VR/AR-enabled atomic-level visualization technologies. We aim to improve the understanding of the core concepts from the chemistry lectures by connecting the atomic-level core concepts such as molecular structure and reactivity with the ongoing laboratory exercise.
• The workload of teachers is reduced because not every single detail has to be taught at a physical laboratory exercise event.

To summarize, we want to develop an open laboratory education virtualization platform, which is so exciting and useful that our colleagues are passionate about implementing it in their own teaching.

In the context of this project, we are also collaborating with the University of Tampere, TAMK, and Metropolia.