Lab3D, an Interactive 3D Virtual Laboratory -- Development of Experiments Across the Science Curriculum
Charles Grisham, Chemistry
John Lloyd, Education
2004 TTI Fellows
The two goals of this project are a) to expand the scope of Lab3D, a fully interactive, virtual, three-dimensional laboratory experience for college undergraduate students and b) to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of Lab3D for student learning. In Lab3D (written in Java), virtual experiments acquaint students with laboratory techniques and procedures, so that they may be better prepared to conduct the same or similar experiments in an actual laboratory. Secondary benefits include precautionary training in the handling of dangerous and/or expensive reagents. More broadly, Lab3D offers a virtual world in which students can work independently to explore essential questions about chemical and biochemical problems and seek answers to these questions by means of experiments they design and conduct
Lab3D has been designed thus far to support Chem 451, 452, the Biological Chemistry Laboratory courses in the Department of Chemistry. In the work proposed here, new Lab3D experiments will be designed for Chem 451, 452, but we will also design additional experiments for laboratory courses in Introductory Chemistry (Chem 181L, 182L), Solutions Chemistry (Chem 222) and Organic Chemistry (Chem 241L, 242L), and also for courses in the Departments of Physics (Phys 221, 222) and Biology (Biol 203, 204). Thus this proposal will directly serve and benefit a total of at least eleven laboratory courses, with the potential for being expanded to more.
A crucial part of this proposal will be to critically evaluate and assess the effectiveness of Lab3D for student learning. Lab3D will be compared head-to-head with other available virtual laboratory software in chemistry, physics, biology, and biochemistry.