Virtual chemistry lab for acid-base titration 

As the most favorite feature of the information part of the virtual chemistry program, the subjects of this study picked the connection of the science concepts to real life.  This means that connecting science concepts into everyday life can be more successful in teaching science concepts that looks even boring and difficult than explaining with pure scientific terms.  The visualization of the content with equations and diagrams was also one of their favorite features and they admitted that it helped understand the content in detail.  Most teachers already use visual aids in their class to maximize the effectiveness of the instructions, but it wonât be overemphasized about the influence of visualizations for instruction and educational software. 

When the students were allowed to choose chemicals to design their own experiment, they were uncomfortable with choosing procedure.  It was because they were so accustomed to following the given procedure without thinking in lab hours.  Unless the objectives of the lab is to foster motor skills to manipulate equipment, not cognitive and affective domain of knowledge, the opportunity to design their own experiment has to be given to students.  It will not be easy for teachers to change the class environment from traditional reception learning to a new style of inquiry based learning, but doing so not only can help the students understand the principles of science but also foster studentsâ logical thinking ability and scientific mind.

When I decided to make a simulation program, I was not confident whether I could finish the program in time because I did not have much programming experience.  Fortunately, I was able to finish the programming of two versions with some help for really technical stuff ö graphic and debugging.  If teachers choose an easy programming language like Visual Basic, they may easily make their own simulation program for the class and the students.  Learning a programming language is not as difficult as many teachers think and the possibility of computerized education is huge.  In this sense, I think I should open the program source to the public so that other educators can modify the program for their class or use it as a reference for developing new programs.  Actually, there are only a few opened source of Java applets and when creating the Java version for the simulation program, it would have helped a lot if there had been a source of similar application.  After modifying the program based on the evaluation, Iâm going to put the source file on my web site so that teachers can use not only the program itself but also the source for modification for their own class.

When programmers design software, they may do their best, but they can not find problems and weaknesses of the program because it was designed by themselves.  Only after getting evaluations from the potential users, they can fix the problems to make more useful software.  My software was not an exception and there were a few problems in the program even after several tedious modification processes.  The subjects of the study pointed out several problems in the software, for example, the separation of the manual and the simulation program itself, and the lack of explanation of operation method at some lab procedure.  These problems are going to be fixed based on the feedback. 

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	Abstract
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