Interactive simulations encourage active/discovery learning in students. But developing simulations is a time consuming task. This along with the usability and scalability issues are the bottleneck in wide availability of such tools. The developer spends most of his/her time in tailoring the user interface (UI) to meet multiple constraints like pedagogy, teacher satisfaction and student learning styles. Providing an efficient way to develop UI can greatly speed up the development cycle and facilitate widespread access to high quality resources. In this paper, we describe how UI development can be separated from the simulation program to facilitate easy development of such visualization tool. We also discuss design and development of Graphical interface construction Kit (GicK) which helps in creating UI and combining it with simulation program for creating interactive simulations. A constructive physics simulation is developed as an exemplar of proposed framework. In the end we reported evaluation of constructive physics simulation by 43 higher school students and our conclusion.

This paper presents a multi-component; distributed system (MuDiS) based solution for building a virtual learning environment which combines a wide range of technology, tools and digital gaming concepts to create an interactive tool for science education. MuDiS has been designed to be an extensible and easy-to-use system. The proposed environment is intended for designing and monitoring of educational content as well as creating a platform for exploring ideas. The system allows exchange of educational content and integrate different pedagogical approaches to learning and teaching under the same environment. We have developed a virtual physics lab that serves as an exemplar for the proposed virtual environment. We present the design details of the physics lab and discuss its performance.