Those chemicals you want to mix? That combination would clear this building. In the virtual lab, it simply teaches why some reactions take place only under extreme conditions, where extreme means extreme caution.
This is the power no one thought possible.
Virtual laboratories began as low-cost alternatives, enabling students to experience laboratory work without the expense of truly costly equipment. They have since evolved into something far more intriguing---"spaces" where danger can be rendered educational, where the impossible can become routine, where failure can be rendered as valuable and experience-enhancing rather than as something that has to be filed away in personal folders marked "epic failure" and "not to be repeated" (in both personal and professional realms).
Beyond Safety Goggles and Fume Hoods
Lab safety in the traditional sense emphasizes prevention. It stresses rules like these: Don't combine certain chemicals. Don't let the temperature go above or below these specified limits. Don't handle any piece of apparatus without a responsible adult supervising. And then necessary mandates impose limits on what can be done in a lab---whether that lab is in a school or a research facility. Safety restricts learning and exploration.
Labs that exist in reverse.
Would you like to find out what results from a reactor being dramatically over-pressurized? Go ahead and do it in virtual space. How about mixing reagents that don't play well together? Virtual space is safe for that, too. You can even virtually violate the commandments of chemistry and physics if you want to see what kind of chaos ensues when you don't follow the rules. In virtual space, engineering disasters become demos of the 'what not to do' variety---something you can learn from without having to experience the aftermath of an actual engineering disaster.
But here's what's really happening: you are acquiring an understanding of danger without actually being in it. You are assembling an intuition about the system's behaviors at the kinds of extremes that would endanger you, were you in the lab with the kinds of foolhardy behaviors that would get you a safety briefing afterward. You are learning why the safety protocols exist and what kinds of things would make them necessary, in scenarios that are safe for you to explore but would be unsafe to attempt as a series of how-to commands.
The Experiments Nobody Could Run
None of these experiments are possible in an educational setting, and for good reason---not just because some are too dangerous, but because certain experiences are just too big and complex for the scale of any educational institution. Think of the places we can't even breathe the air without getting masks on, where every person is working behind multiple layers of protective gear, where the potential for a mistake is too great to allow any undergrad or even grad student free access to the labs on the path to a degree.
Virtual laboratories democratize the impossible.
As an undergraduate in nuclear engineering, you'd typically learn theoretical reactor physics, with maybe one visit to an operational reactor in your program. Virtual labs? You're controlling reactor dynamics, inducing criticality excursions, exploring failure modes that would be catastrophic in reality. Intuition? You're developing the operational kind that took years of supervised experience to cultivate in the past.
Across disciplines, the same transformation is seen. Students of chemistry probe reactions that are too dangerous or too expensive to stage in conventional teaching labs. Biology students tinker with viral genomes without a ripple of biosafety concern. Structural engineering students test the sorts of massive structural failures that would cost a small fortune to replicate in the physical world. And the simulators make the impossible seem routine and the exclusive accessible.
Why Perfect Simulation Misses the Point
Some critics maintain that virtual labs are just not real labs. That's true; they aren't. But saying that misses the whole point of a lab, virtual or otherwise.
Labs are not just places where perfect mimicking of nature happens; they are places where you go to get your hands dirty and figure stuff out, with copious amounts of trial and error, if necessary.
Actual laboratories restrict learning in ways we seldom recognize. We rarely think about the distance they place between scientists and the ideal form of learning. Why do real labs do this? Because of time pressure, for one thing. We don't have enough of it to try the same experiment many times, to tinker with the parameters until we fully understand the system, to attempt (and fail) with the different designs that might be possible (and safe) if carried out in a properly supervised, free-range, and explosion-free environment. When constraints vanish, you learn in another way. You do not follow the laid-out routes to reach the anticipated endings. Instead, you take paths that lead you to ask, what if I double the temperature? Triple the pressure? Reverse the order? Add an unexpected catalyst? In real labs, such questions stay as they are, merely hypothetical. In virtual labs, they demand answers and elicit a range of investigative behaviors that might result in their being answered.
The Failure Paradox
Here's an awkward reality: in actual laboratories, the appearance of failure is frowned upon. Not in a direct way---every teacher extols the virtue of learning from your blunders. But in an indirect way? Experiments that don't have a happy ending waste stuff---materials, time, and access to equipment. They push back the completion of the lab work that is part of the course. They make the lab partners (the other student) unhappy. They make the instructors (who are usually quite smart, by the way) unhappy when they have to read reports that don't have the kind of content that is expected.
Failing while learning is a key tenet of the design of the educational experiences offered by virtual labs. Virtual labs design many ways for users to mess up and then guide them to the mistakes and their corrections. Some even call this type of learning "failing forward," a phrase that emphasizes the importance of not only learning from one's mistakes but also having the kind of mindset that sees failures as integral to the experience.
Nothing but time is lost when an experiment fails. The equipment is in no way damaged, and if it were, no repair time would be needed; the equipment would still work perfectly when called upon in the next successful experiment. The samples are lost, but in science, losing samples is an essential feature of the process. Samples illuminate; they go beyond mere data to inform our understanding of the situation at hand. Occasionally, they whisper secrets---what could happen, what might happen.
Observe how students work in standard labs compared to virtual labs. Standard labs train students to be cautious---careful following of lab procedures, a heightened concern about making mistakes, a focus on getting results that are "correct." Virtual labs train students to explore---systematic variation of parameters, deliberate testing of the boundaries of their knowledge, and an inquisitive attitude toward the failure of their first attempts. Same students, same objectives, different lab, wildly different behaviors.
The Unexpected Social Dynamics
Assume for a moment that virtual labs actually are isolating. For all the reasons one might imagine, they set learners in a lab apart from others. No lab partners. No shared equipment. No collaborative troubleshooting. Just individuals at screens, doing lab work in solitude. Is that even an accurate picture of what virtual labs are like? Or is it the portrait of a particular kind of learner? Nothing is as good as the real thing. But real labs are in many ways the antithesis of the collaborative nature of science---they're solitary spaces, where one student at a time works with equipment essential to the natural sciences. Real labs are not only solitary but also to a large extent, static. You have partners in the lab, but you're not all doing the same thing at the same time. You're locked into an apparatus without the possibility of shared, simultaneous exploration, which is one of the very aspects of science that makes it a social enterprise. In a real lab, you're time-sharing the same space, working on what are often individually determined, if not secret, projects.
Breaking the Time Barrier
Academic calendars dictate the operation of physical laboratories. They run in two-hour blocks, once per week. Equipment is shared by a staggering number of sections. Not only are experiments designed to fit these time constraints, but they are also attempted to be fitted into even tighter schedules. What about missing a week? You're just expected to be behind. Some scheduling is so egregious that discussions about it seem like a parody. Want to repeat an intriguing result? You have to wait until the next time that experiment is scheduled for the next semester (and not only that, but you also may have to wait for a coordinator to run and reschedule it). For all of the physical constraints of a physical lab, the virtual lab can operate under none of them, by its very nature.
The Skills Nobody Expected
Virtual labs were intended to impart scientific ideals in a secure environment. They accomplish this. Yet, they bequeath something beyond that to our students: the unexpected, but not unjustified, outcome of developing a skill that may transfer to realms outside of science. What's that skill? It's the ability to be a systematic experimentalist. Our students are now well-prepared to conduct experiments in a non-disruptive way in any area of life, not just in a lab. What's remarkable is the mindset they acquire along the way.
More than particular scientific knowledge, these meta-skills matter. They are what make someone comfortable with the idea of controlled failure, as is often the case in entrepreneurship; they apply to any complex problem when systematic experimentation is necessary; and they allow for (and, in fact, reward) the kind of pattern recognition that serves a scientist well when attempting to figure out the behavior of a system---any system---over multiple attempts.
You see this in students. Their paths would diverge, depending on how much virtual lab experience they'd had. Much of that experience had been in unsafe scenarios, which I might do a bad job of selling right now, given the current context. But, seriously, lab safety is something I care a lot about, and that's the very reason students ought to have safe virtual lab experiences. With those, they can engage in dangerous experiments without fear of bodily harm. Why then can virtual labs be unsafe? Because when it comes to developing a lab mindset, practice in a virtual lab has less risk attached to it than practice in a real lab.
Where Physical and Virtual Converge
The future isn't the virtual replacing the physical---it's intelligent integration. Virtual laboratories for hazardous exploration and unlimited iteration. Physical laboratories for hands-on, real-world, tactile experiments with unlimited complexity. And because they each support the other and enrich one another, together they are creating something that is far too complex---and all too important---to be allowed to whittle down to either one half or the other.
Think about it this way: You dive into the virtually possible and the largely impossible up close in reality, and you do it with a couple of atoms, or hundreds, or even thousands, or even a billion, for those of us who can't count that high. That's the progression from virtual to real, yes? Because in the past, you, or more accurately your predecessors, have taken what you've learned to the lab, sometimes with huge breakthroughs in understanding living systems. Or, as the National Science Foundation puts it, using virtual reality to bridge the gap between understanding reaction dynamics and the physical reality of lab experiments. This hybrid model maximizes the strengths of both environments. The virtual space offers breadth and safety, while the physical space offers depth and reality. Together, they create experimentalists who are equally comfortable in both settings and understand well each space's advantages and limitations.
The Democratization Nobody Saw Coming
Elite institutions always had better labs. More equipment, newer technology, broader experiments. This disparity shaped educational outcomes. Students at resource-rich schools did experiments that the rest of us couldn't do. They gained experiences. They accessed opportunities. Virtual labs eliminate this inequality.
At present, you go to a rural community college that has almost no lab facilities. With virtual space, you access the same experimental possibilities as a student at any big-time university. You're not just doing the kind of work that gets you through to the next step; you're doing real experimental science. Everything you're learning goes on to simulate either a nuclear reactor or complex chemical reactions in the context of a huge, long-term, NSF-supported project.
This extends to every corner of the world. Nations with limited resources can offer high-quality education that tests the very limits of our understanding, and they can do it without pouring money into the kind of infrastructure that more developed countries might assume as a precondition for such education. They have access to what, in the United States and in Western Europe, would be called world-class laboratories. Of the kind that such a demographic might never assume was available to them.
What This Means for Tomorrow
You are seeing education change. Not only in science---in the way we teach risky or expensive skills. Flight simulators showed us that pilots can develop their skills in a virtual setting. Virtual labs in education are proving to do the same for experimentalists. And this pattern will find its way into every field where real-world practice is fraught with danger or expense. However, the change that runs deeper is philosophical. We are acknowledging that fully immersive simulations are not a prerequisite for efficacious learning. That failing in a safe space can provide more valuable lessons than always succeeding. That having time in which to play with an idea is as critical as having the right tools to realize one's vision. And above all, that making experiences widely available outranks hoarding them as far as true progress goes.
Originally, virtual labs were a way of providing lab experiences without providing lab materials. They were a stopgap. But now, laboratories that don't physically exist are spaces where rigging up holographic models of systems can become a learning exercise; where getting a wrong reading can be a teachable moment; where "dangerous" experiments can be run safely. VR is used to enhance the learning part of the equation. It's not substituting for real labs. It's stretching the concept of what labs can be.
The next time someone dismisses virtual labs as 'not real,' remember: flight simulators aren't real flights, either. But they produce real pilots. Virtual labs produce real experimentalists who are okay with failing, are systematic in their exploratory work, and are fearless in their investigative work. And that's not compromise---it's transformation.
Mentis Sciences leads the way in STEM education and high-tech innovation. From virtual safe spaces to the stage of advanced implementation, we bring the prospect of reality into our tools and give virtual safe spaces a shot at an advanced cyber stage.
Visit us for a look at STEM education that is a mix of the traditional (safe space exploration) and the cutting-edge (hologram, virtual and mixed reality technologies that even a skeptic wouldn't mind). Indeed, 'ask not what this cyber stage can do for you, ask what you can do for this cyber stage!'
STEM education, that is. Visit us at www.mentissciences.com.
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