However, my feeling in general is that with limited lab equipment and
budgets even the most primative real lab is more meaningful than most
virtual labs.
Oh, my! This is one of the most unarguable statements I have ever seen.
I am director of an all volunteer, zero cost (and un-funded),
extra-curricular, coeducational, hands-on, project building experience
for k-12. In the past we have been given old 386/486 computers nearly
every week, and we have our youth take them apart.
They also take apart old radios, tape recorders, TVs, microwave ovens,
hair dryers, lawnmower engines and any thing else that people will give
us. The youth in our program love taking things apart. We store the
parts and have amassed the most wonderful, zero cost, assortment of
building, tinkering and experimenting fodder that any school could ever
want. Not only do the youth learn a great deal from getting inside of
things, but they learn what the different parts are as they sort and
store them, and also when they go to look for what they need for their
projects.
No computer simulation could ever furnish the exhilaration felt by a
youth when their very own projects works for the first time, and nothing
can replace the lessons that are learned when parts go up in smoke and
fill the room with acrid smells. These are the moments we use as times
for cheering. Nothing can take the place of picking up the soldering
iron by the wrong end, which about ninety five percent of our students
do at least once. We have come to consider it a sort of "right of
passage". Designing circuits, mechanical layouts, and working with real
parts in three dimensional space is a boon for developing critical
thinking skills.
We don't use computers to simulate on, we use them to make real world
things happen. Our fleet of Commodore C-64s are almost the perfect,
nearly zero cost, process controllers. Rather than simulating lab
projects, our kids write their own programs both in basic and in machine
language that turn on and off the motors that raise homemade elevators
and power tethered cars, etc.
For about eleven years we worked only with high school youth who were
headed toward engineering school or into physics. Nearly five years ago
we started experimenting with first graders and were amazed at the
conceptual understanding that they quickly developed for electricity and
mechanics.
Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, during the
past two years we have focused in on the group that we inadvertently
discovered were our best projecteers, regardless of which grade they
were in. These are the kids who have been labeled as having ADD.
Kids need real experiences, with real things, with real people mentoring
them. At the level that most kids are projecting, it does not require
the skills of a teacher to work with them. Any interested adult with a
knack with tools can do the job. However it takes a teacher to make it
all happen.
Sorry for getting carried away, but my experience indicates that there
should be no school in this "throw-a-way capitol of the world" (USA),
that can't find enough treasure in the discards to have a fine,
hands-on, science course for nearly nothing.
Bill Allsopp: Director
Project Labs of Arkansas
Note: At this moment Project Lab is a name only, and we are without
students. A private school that is dedicated to ADD students, decided
at the last minute that they did not have room for our activities. and
we have not yet found another home for Project Lab that will allow us to
work with only ADD youth. What a disappointment.