DEVELOPMENT OF A VIRTUAL LABORATORY EXPERIMENT FOR CHEMISTRY STUDENTS

Laboratory-based learning allows students to experience science principles at first hand, so it is a main resource in science teaching. Laboratory trainings are often limited to just a few sessions because they are costly (equipments and consumables) and time consuming for the staff. The virtual practices become an interesting solution to limit educational laboratory costs without constraining learning opportunities. Also in this case, further direct experimentation on real systems should be considered after the preliminary remote practice, but limited to a better understanding of the course topics. In this way, online experiments can be powerful auxiliary didactic tool for the students in order to help them to become acquainted with the instrument and its controls and basic laboratory operations. This helps in reducing training costs by restricting the tutored activities only to substantial matters. We wished to move away from whole class demonstrations and instead encourage a more student-focused learning of procedures to enhance autonomous learning. Benefits included: development of more autonomous learners, more time to pool and analyse class data, demonstrators' time being used for higher-level interaction with students, an initial approach to instruments, and measurement procedures and applications supporting students in familiarizing themselves with complex instruments and analytical problems. A virtual practice about liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry analysis for chemistry students has been developed. The instrumentation needed for this practice is expensive so it is not available in educational laboratories. For this reason, the practices which use this equipment are only carried out in a theoretical way. Therefore, a better understanding of the involved phenomena and measurement problems could be achieved with the virtual application.