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史坦顿岛学院（SIA）成为去年使用Labster VR的第一所高中，当时Suzanna Katz博士（科学系主席和高中STEM教练）探索了她的选择，以使用典型的设备和时间限制来教她的学生特定的实验室技术一位学校老师。
“We started the pilot program with Labster this summer right before the school semester started.” Dr. Katz said. “It was actually the beginning of my job at SIA. I had recently finished my PhD degree. I was very interested in technology, and the intersection between technology and biology. I really wanted to integrate that into my new experience as a teacher.”
继续阅读以了解Katz博士是如何从Labster开始的，以及她如何使用实验室模拟使她的高级展位生物学学生对在高科技现代研究实验室中应用复杂的教科书概念感到兴奋。华体会赞助ac米兰
搜索在线实验室组件
When Dr. Katz started as a teacher at SIA, she was told that her longest classes would be relatively short, which naturally made it more difficult to teach AP Biology topics: “It’s a long curriculum that I think is very difficult for most teachers to really get through while at the same time providing in-depth examples. Our longest class is an hour, and it’s very difficult to do certain labs in an hour, especially when you also don’t have the kinds of equipment that you see in a university setting.” But Dr. Katz was determined to expose her students to that experience. So she started searching for simulations online. “I had already heard about virtual reality, so I tried to look for a VR app that would have some sort of lab integration.”
One of the criteria that was important to Dr. Katz in her search was how the technology affected her students: “I wanted to get a more advanced device because I knew there was this risk of having a low frame rate that would make the students nauseous. And I thought that would be a disaster if I put a device on the kids that would make them feel sick!”
Dr. Katz honed in on the kinds of devices that would fit that criteria and that would also give her students an immersive experience. “I started leaning towards the standalone devices from Google because I wanted something that was easy to figure out, didn’t have too many moving parts, and could be used without difficulty with my group of kids. I also wanted something where there was potential for large adoption, and I had the faith that if you go with something like Google, they would also release more content. So that’s how I narrowed it down to the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Google Daydream. And then I saw that Labster was one of their apps and I checked it out! And I thought: that sounds perfect, that’s what we need! So I got in touch with Labster and that was how the pilot was born.”
第一所使用Labster VR的高中
“It went very quickly from there. I presented it to our school directors and they loved the idea of enriching the class experience in this way. The approval process went quickly and I was amazed at how little red tape there was in implementing such a new technology,” Dr. Katz explained.
“I presented it to our school directors and they loved the idea of enriching the class experience in this way.”
Next step from there was to find out how the labs could be integrated into the curriculum. With help from the Labster support team, Dr. Katz got started soon after. “The idea that I could now get a complicated lab done within one single period or have them be able to finish it at home was really attractive.”
So SIA started the pilot program, making them the first high school to try Labster VR. “So that was exciting too. The kids were particularly excited about it, and they’d never seen anything like it. I think they also felt really special that they were chosen to do this,” Dr. Katz said.
华体会赞助ac米兰使高中生教学主题的模拟
利用不同的教育技术,博士。Katz designed her course with an assortment of tools: “I definitely have a mixed media learning environment. I often start with some kind of visual or video to introduce them to the topic, just so they get a feel for the overarching ideas and principles. Then I do lectures where I go over the concepts in detail. As we progress in the topic, we’ll do in-class exercises or homework to solidify their knowledge. Then, once I sense they understand the concepts relatively well – we would do the simulation. That’s the general flow of it. So the simulations give them that cohesive feeling of the topic and expose them to applications of the concepts that would typically only be found in university settings.”
“作为老师，使用虚拟实验室并通过需要可视化和体育练习的主题确实很有帮助。”
Dr. Katz used the simulations to cover several topics, including Evolution, Polymerase Chain Reaction lab, RNA extraction, Viral Gene Therapy, Gene Expression and Gene Regulation: “We’ve been using it quite a lot. We went through a few simulations already and they really fit with our curriculum. It’s been particularly useful for our biotechnologies section, since we covered a range of devices and tools that are not typically available in high school settings, such as those they got to experience with the Stem Cell Culture lab or the Viral Gene Therapy lab. I definitely can’t give them a pluripotent stem cell experience or a viral gene therapy experience in a high school lab due to the cost and regulations involved in using those technologies. So it’s been really helpful for me as a teacher to use the virtual labs and get through topics that require visualization and physical practice. They are essentially getting a level of experience that I was not exposed to until my thesis work in graduate school. ”
Overcoming the challenges of new technology
Being a novel form of educational technology, the VR headsets did take some getting used to for Dr. Katz and her students: “Although Labster works just fine, there are a few quirks that you have to deal with in terms of the device itself. For example, the children have to get used to using the remote control.” As with all Labster’s customers, Dr. Katz was assigned a Customer Support Manager, Laura Wirzpa, to help her get started and make sure that things ran smoothly throughout the semester. “Laura really helped me through all that. I was constantly in communication with her through these issues, so that was great, having that support.”
As the semester progressed, Dr. Katz experienced that her students got more comfortable with the technology: “They’ve been more fluent with it, and it has worked as long as the device and remote were fully charged. So I can see them improving and asking for help a lot less. I see that they’re definitely getting more used to it and actually really looking forward to it!”
一个学生如何从障碍到反思学习
Although the novel technology took some time getting used to, it also provided obvious benefits that Dr. Katz hadn’t seen before with other learning methods: “Last week when the students were doing the Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture lab, one of them came to me for help.
“这种学习，我只是认为您无法摆脱一本书。您只能通过在实验室中进行学习。而且由于我不能给他们，所以这是下一个最好的事情。”
起初，我们认为系统中可能有一个故障，因为她试图在模拟中采取行动，而什么都不会发生。然后她再次看了看，事实证明，她在哺乳动物文化方案中只是犯了一个错误。她在其中已经有旧媒体的东西中添加了干细胞媒体，因此该应用程序不会让她前进，她不得不重新开始。因此，通过使用该模拟，我的学生自己想出了问题所在。她了解环境，并了解到在将新东西放入之前，要摆脱旧东西很重要，而且她还了解到，更换移液器很重要。而且这种学习，我只是认为您无法摆脱一本书。您只能通过在实验室中进行学习。而且由于我不能给他们，所以这是下一个最好的事情。”
Positive student feedback
班级的最初匿名调查表明，学生认为Labster是一种有用的补充，它帮助他们更好地理解了这些概念。Dr. Katz didn’t need the data to tell her the students were happy with it, however : “I know that the students like Labster because they told me that they like it, think it’s a fun way to learn, and even ask me when we are going to have another one. That it’s kind of like playing a video game. I also know they like it as a way for them to enhance their grade while also enhancing their level of understanding on a complex topic. They know it depends on the effort they put into it since I let them repeat the labs several times and take the best grade. In a real lab, if you make a mistake during the protocol, you often have to repeat it until you get it right, but this way we don’t use up expensive reagents in the process or spend precious time on lengthy incubation steps,” Dr. Katz explained. She let the students do the VR simulations in class with her, and then gave them the option to finish at home on their desktop, letting them repeat the simulations until they understood the concepts well. “Since students have to answer questions as they proceed through the lab, completing the assignment shows they’ve gained a solid understanding of the topic. And it’s not like a test per se, because the students can always finish it at home on their computers.”
虚拟实验室：未来教育的重要组成部分
总的来说,Katz博士实验室的一个积极的印象ster and a belief that virtual labs would play a significant role in science learning going forward: “I think simulations are going to be a really big part of the future. There’s really no other way to go about it. Unless we start allowing high school labs to do mammalian cell culture and equipping them with next-generation sequencing machines or the standard equipment that you would have in a university lab, we’re going to really fall behind on what we’re teaching. Yes, we could do some DNA extractions or PCR, but to get a full range of what you’d experience in a university setting would be prohibitively expensive. So you might invest in one type of equipment but you’ll never be able to recapitulate everything that’s happening in a real science lab. And it’s important to teach to current science. It’s moving very quickly now. There’s new equipment, there are new techniques, and I think it’s going to be very difficult for high schools to be catching up with that unless we somehow integrate some sort of simulation environment.
I also think that providing these experiences of actually being in a lab – being a scientist – I think that is the best way to learn science. One of the students in our Advanced Placement Biology class that worked at a lab over the summer recognized some of the techniques and equipment that appeared in the Labster simulations as similar to the ones in a real research institute.
Making mistakes, saving money, and speeding up time
Having used Labster for a while now, Dr. Katz had found several advantages of using virtual labs, and even though she would have gained a lot from having the labs available to her when she was completing her own education: “Having been in the lab myself for many years, I think it’s actually a really great way to learn some of the techniques. Because otherwise when you make a mistake in the real lab, you have probably wasted a lot of time and money, especially when you’re dealing with things like pluripotent stem cells or viral gene therapy.
试剂很昂贵，酶很昂贵，干细胞本身非常昂贵。因此，在这种环境下，能够犯错是一件非常好的事情。我希望我在启动博士学位课程时拥有Labster，以便以这种方式学习其中的一些技术。我喜欢在Labster中如何加快孵化时间 - 我希望我在博士学位期间也拥有它！首先在Labster中尝试，然后在现实生活中进行尝试，这是一次很好的经历。
“在这种环境下，能够犯错是一件非常好的事情。我希望我在开始我的博士学位课程时拥有Labster，以便以这种方式学习一些这些技术。”
因此，我希望它能为学生提供同样的东西。That’ll be really important, not just for high schools, but also for college programs or even in research as an educational tool, where you don’t want to have to have your young student go through the trauma of messing up an important construct or precious patient samples, and instead letting them have that practice first.So I think it’s going to be really big. I honestly think it’s going to be an important part of science education moving forward.”
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