Vladimir Antonov (Associate Professor, Dept for Computer Security, NCFU) is pursuing an idea that may turn the entire school world – virtual laboratories, which may boost the quality of school training and make teachers’ life a bit easier.

For 18 months now, Vladimir Antonov, together with his colleagues – Vyacheslav Petrenko (Cand. Of Technical Sciences) and Fariza Tebueva (Doctor of Physical & Mathematical Sciences) – has been working on bringing together the reality and virtual environment. The most successful area to introduce the development is school education. Vladimir attended a Chemistry class in school a couple of years ago, and could see that children have no experiments with chemical substances because in some cases there are no chemicals, while in others – no teaching staff and equipment.

– Children watch respective videos on YouTube, or the teacher may show them, and then they describe the experiment. Besides, nobody in schools has ever held experiments with gold, diamonds or oil because this is really expensive and dangerous. The school curriculum does not contain such classes. Now, our technology will help make it a reality, – Mr. Antonov noted.

Last December, the researcher created the ExRobotics company, which was needed to win a grant to develop a chemical lab, and finally got a grant of RUR 2 mln for the first year of activities.

The main thing to be offered by ExRobotics to schoolers is equipment and technical maintenance for that. In the Chemistry classrooms there may be special tables installed with a tablet and a haptic glove. A kid will put on the glove and carry out the respective experiment in the virtual environment, at the same time takin notes of the entire process.

Now, there are also plane to design virtual classes for Geography, Life Safety, Physics, and History. Despite all the positive points about this approach, Vladimir Antonov is sure that this cannot be a full-scale substitute for real experiments and studies, and can only be employed as an assisting technology in some cases.

Source: https://pobeda26.ru