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fuels; aspects related to environmental chemistry.
Objectives: develop critical awareness about the
importance of environmental management in the
exercise of Engineering” (General Technological
Chemistry contents). Beyond the expositive les-
sons, the students have activities in laboratory
classes, with the intention to create more proximity
with the chemistry and the concepts which have
been worked in classroom.
A previous interview with the QTG profes-
sors was made to list the difficulties of the
students and the professors (Trigo, Olguin &
Matai, 2008). The main one was the problem
the students face to interrelate the concepts ap-
proached in the course. This issue comes from
another one, the problem the professors have
to create a better chronogram for the discipline.
Because QTG is a basic course, the number of
concepts taught is very high and the number of
lessons is restricted, what causes a difficulty
for the professors, once they cannot deepen the
concepts and do not have enough time to relate
them in the way that they would like. Thus, the
students don't see how one subject is related
to another one, which causes a student's loss
of interest. The same issue affects the labora-
tory classes of QTG. Students feel that the
laboratory classes have no relation with the
theory, because they don't understand how the
laboratory classes complement what is seen in
the classroom.
Taking this into consideration, in the interview
with the professors, a proposal came up to develop
Applets covering the topics of the discipline and
join them in a main “host” Applet, creating a virtual
chemistry laboratory, which would be available
for the students in the discipline's website. The
intentions of this work would be to show, in an
interactive way, how the topics interrelate with
each other. The purpose of the virtual laboratory is
not to substitute the traditional laboratory classes
or the lessons, but to be a tool that complements
what is taught in the discipline, improving the
students learning.
To reach the expected effect, these Applets have
to present some characteristics discussed above.
High interactivity is certainly a main one. A clear
and efficient interconnection among the topics
covered in the Applets is another important one.
To achieve these, a conceptual map was created,
to be a guideline for the development process.
Conceptual maps are graphical representations
that aim to show how the concepts relate to each
other. The concepts appear inside boxes and the
relations are specified through linking phrases,
which connects the boxes. From the conceptual
map, the topic electrochemistry was chosen to start
the development of the Applets. An electrochem-
istry Applet was developed, using methodologies
that make the student participate actively with the
simulation, to contribute to the QTG discipline.
The Applet was used in a group test in the first
semester of 2009, and a questionnaire was de-
veloped to try to create metrics to calculate the
effectiveness of the Applet in the student. The
results were collected and analyzed, showing
some positive feedback from the students. QTG
discipline is planning on using the Applet in the
first semester of 2010.
mEtHodoLogIES
After the elaboration of the electrochemistry Ap-
plet, an activity was conducted with a test group,
composed of 30 students of the second year of
engineering at University of São Paulo. These
students participate in this activity in a volun-
tary basis, and all of the second year students of
the Chemistry, Materials, Metallurgy and Mine
courses were invited, for the proximity of these
areas with the knowledge area of Chemistry.
The activity, accomplished in May of 2009, had
the presentation of two different computational
simulations for the students, called expositive
simulation and interactive simulation. The exposi-
tive simulation, found in the tutorvista web site,
is an electrolysis simulation that has animations
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