An Interactive and Intelligent Learning System for Physics Education

Abstract

Students tend to retain naı ¨ve understandings of concepts such as energy and force even after completing school and entering college. We developed a learning environment called the Virtual Physics System (ViPS) to help students master these concepts in the context of pulleys, a class of simple machines that are difficult to assemble and use in the real world. Several features make the ViPS noteworthy: it combines simulation and tutoring, it customizes tutoring to address common misconceptions, and it employs a pedagogical strategy that identifies student misconceptions and guides students in problem solving through virtual experimentation. This paper presents the ViPS and describes studies in which we evaluated its efficacy and compared learning from the ViPS with learning from constructing and experimenting with real pulleys. Our results indicate that the ViPS is effective in helping students learn and remediate their misconceptions, and that virtual experimentation in the ViPS is more effective than real experimentation with pulleys.

Computer problem-solving coaches for introductory physics: Design and usability studies

“…Some of these efforts engage students in natural language dialogues [19,20] and introduce tools to help students solve quantitative problems [21,22]. Although such systems are more than a decade old, none are in wide use and their domains of applicability tend to be limited to one or two topics from introductory physics such as kinematics or Newton's laws, or a few concepts from electricity and magnetism.…”

Learning outcome achievement in non-traditional (virtual and remote) versus traditional (hands-on) laboratories: A review of the empirical research

“…experimental error), what Magin and Kanapathipillai (2000) describe as "unexpected clashes" (p. 352). Others, however, present evidence that supports non-traditional (virtual, remote) labs (NTL) as potentially sufficient replacements for TL (Cameron, 2003;Corter, Esche, Chassapis, Ma, & Nickerson, 2011;Lang, 2012;Myneni, Narayanan, Rebello, Rouinfar, & Pumtambekar, 2013;Pyatt & Sims, 2007;Zacharia & Olympiou, 2011). With NTL, students have multiple opportunities to access resources and a greater amount of time to complete specific laboratory activities, thus allowing repetition and modification, thereby fostering deeper learning (Charuk, 2010).…”

Intelligent tutoring Module for a 3Dgame-based science e-learning platform

“…With decades of research and development, ITS now have been built for various scientific domains such as physics [36], [22], [19], mathematics [9], [1], [41], chemistry [3], computer programming [16], [42], engineering [7], [26], medicine [13], [40], and so on. These studies showed that virtual manipulative through the ITS can significantly improve the learning.…”