Building a Web-Based Visualized Authoring System to Collaboratively Create Reconfigurable and Diagnostic Virtual Experiments in Natural Science

Training the Experimental Ability (EA) of students can enhance their science learning and further foster the high-level thinking and problem-solving abilities. Virtual Experiment (VE) can assist teachers and students in improving learning performance of EA. However, most of VEs offer either the non-reconfigurable content or higher technical-threshold authoring tools. For teachers, the former may not be meet the teaching requirements and the latter may not be easy to be used. Furthermore, most of them also lack the automatic diagnosis process, so the effectiveness of learning assistance is thus limited. In order to facilitate the construction and diagnosis of VEs, this paper develops a Collaborative Diagnostic Virtual Experiment System (Co Dive) in Natural Science. It is able to efficiently assists teachers in online collaboratively creating, reusing, and reconfiguring the Diagnostic Virtual Experiment (DiVE) using Visualized Reusable Object-based Construction Scheme via Web interface, and in analyzing students´ operational portfolio using automatic diagnosis process, and offering personalized diagnostic reports for the self-learning and self-reflection.