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作为教授在仅讲课课程的非生物化学学生的教授生物化学，加利福尼亚州立大学化学和生物化学副教授Kambiz Hamadani博士一直在寻找一种方法来使他的课程更具吸引力，更易于理解他的学生。
He wanted to improve his teaching and increase student achievement of course learning outcomes by means of new and innovative teaching methods, and for that reason, he sought out Labster to see how he could integrate a few of the virtual lab simulations in his courses. He quickly found that the virtual labs helped his students understand the content better, and helped him overcome several barriers he was experiencing in his course:
“Labster帮助打开门更多的调查ased style of presenting the content, because the students were exploring. They were walking around in a virtual lab, messing up, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. This is something that you typically can’t do all that well in a hands-on lab, where you have a fixed amount of time, fixed amount of resources, and safety concerns have to come into the equation.”
Read on to learn how Dr. Hamadani used Labster in his course, and how it helped him increase student achievement of course learning outcomes.
在实验室之前
Before Dr. Hamadani tried Labster, there were three areas in particular that he believed could benefit from novel teaching methods:
Low engagement
在他的普通生物化学类,lecture-onlycourse offered to primarily non-biochemistry majors as a requirement, Dr. Hamadani found that he needed a way to increase engagement among his students. He wanted to not only make the difficult topics easier to learn, but also to find a way to increase general interest in the subject, and make the classes more exciting.
Limited time
Hamadani博士试图将他的学生以前在本科生物学和化学课程中学到的一般生物化学课中学到的内容汇集在一起，但由于这是一个学期课程，需要涵盖很多内容，因此他发现很难很难覆盖所有相关材料。Hamadani博士测试了翻转课堂的选择，尽管这在某种程度上确实有帮助，但学期中仍然没有足够的时间来涵盖所有内容。
Lack of application
Due to the lack of a lab section for General Biochemistry, the students got no hands-on experience, making it difficult for them to grasp complex methods, tools and concepts. This made the course a challenge to teach. Dr. Hamadani wanted to use Labster to give the students more of an applied feel for the techniques that were taught in his class, and teach them how the concepts they were learning could be applied.
Labster如何帮助
Hamadani博士开始使用Labster的虚拟实验室，主要是Enzyme Kinetics, in his General Biochemistry class to help students get practical experience with concepts and techniques, which solidified their understanding of course content.
Hamadani博士并没有将Labster视为替换教科书的解决方案，而是作为可以帮助学生了解他们学到的知识并提高实验室技能的补充剂：
“The power of Labster really was in allowing students to make all sorts of mistakes, which were necessary in order to really, truly learn how to do science and how to do these experiments. It’s inevitable that the students will make mistakes and it’s a great advantage to allow them to make those mistakes over and over again to really perfect their virtual skills.”
“实验室的力量确实在于允许学生犯各种错误，这对于真正学习如何做科学是必要的。”
To learn more about exactly what effect virtual labs had on his students’ learning outcomes, Dr. Hamadani assessed the students’ understanding of the topics taught in his class before, during and after using Labster. He compared the results to see if the virtual labs produced the results he was looking for, and came to some interesting conclusions:
“我发现需要在应用水平上需要高级思维技能的问题受益于实验室模块的学生。因此，Labster实质上迫使学生走出教科书或课程的小盒子，并真正让他们以不同的方式运用内容知识，最终巩固了他们对材料的理解。”
“So Labster essentially forced students to step out of their little box of the textbook or the course and really got them to apply the content knowledge in different ways.”
观看来自CSU的视频，以了解有关Labster如何对学生对应用内容的表现产生积极影响的更多信息：
Giving his students the opportunity to work on their practical skills also had the advantage of preparing the students for potential careers as scientists.
“I think this application adds a great value, because this is ultimately what they’re going to be doing when they go out there in the real world. They’re not going to be asked test questions. They’re going to be asked questions like: “Go purify a protein” or “tell me what this small molecule does to this organism.” It’s very hard, even with traditional labs, to get students to think in those ways if you don’t have that open-ended, inquiry based lab. And Labster offers that in a very unique way.”
“It’s very hard, even with traditional labs, to get students to think in those ways if you don’t have that open-ended, inquiry based lab. And Labster offers that in a very unique way.”
Another element Dr. Hamadani studied was his students’ intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in learning biochemistry. He found that for students using labster, there was a small decrease in the perception that biochemistry is boring, and students perceived classes as more fun due to the use of the virtual labs.
总体而言，哈马达尼博士发现，Labster的虚拟实验室使他的学生了解了在真实实验室工作的感觉，并让他们深入了解“现实世界”中可以使用的科学。这gamified elements of the labs结合嵌入式理论和评估页面ments solidified the students’ knowledge and increase their understanding of difficult topics.
To learn more about how you can achieve similar results with your students, or to learn how Labster can be implemented in your science classes,填这张表格由Labster代表联系。
