Development of Simulation-based Contents for Exploratory Science Education Connecting Real and Virtual World

Abstract

This study implemented science learning contents by GoGo Board, an open source hardware, and NetLogo, a free software. We built a customized GoGo Board, incarnated experimental environment for learning using various sensors and then utilized NetLogo to develop exploratory science contents. The selected topics cover heat equilibrium for changing temperature appeared in the textbook of middle school science class. With the proposed devices, students can visualize the change of temperature cold and hot waters in terms of heat equilibrium. The developed simulation contents were validated with computational checking procedures using one of the NetLogo's special features. At the end, we report the evaluation results with two K middle school students for formative evaluation.