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A small group of high school students performed a virtual laboratory experiment in Second Life that mimicked a real experiment in both its appearance and procedure. Lab report grades were equivalent to report grades for hands-on experiments, and the quality of students’ results was similar. Results of an attitudinal survey show that students expressed similarly favorable views of the hands-on and virtual experiments, and they found that report writing was equally challenging for both types of experiments. The virtual experiment required significantly less time to complete. The quality of the students’ results and their responses to the survey demonstrate that a laboratory exercise in Second Life may be a feasible alternative to an experiment in a real laboratory setting.
Winkelmann et al. (Tue,) studied this question.