Object based modelling environments applied to science education

Several ICT environments are available today to help science teachers focus their pedagogic activities on modelling and make easy the implementation of modelling strategies in science education. They facilitate the construction of adequate mental models that help the understanding of physical and common-life phenomena. Examples of learning strategies are reported by using a particular ICT tool, NetLogo. It allows the user to control the behaviour of thousands of objects in parallel, each object having its own variables and state. This allows one to model the behaviour of distributed and probabilistic systems, that often exhibit complex dynamics, enabling the user to model systems directly at the level of their individual constituent elements. Our reported modelling examples were experimented on during some laboratory sessions of the Pre-Service School for Physics Teacher Education (S.S.I.S.) and validated in the trainee teachers' apprenticeship activities.