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Implementation of virtual worlds in distance studies
... These avatars mediate our experience of this space as we move, interact with objects and interact with others, with whom we construct a shared understanding of the world at that time" (Girvan, 2018). Nowadays there is a growing interest in the use of virtual reality environments because "through immersive education participants can be offered a feeling of 'being there', through a synchronous connection that allows them to communicate with a sense of presence" (Contreras-Mendieta et al., 2018). Among virtual worlds, OpenSimulator, aka Opensim, is a highly customizable open-source platform, used also for educational purposes for collaboration, simulation, gamification approaches and experimentation (Gregory et al., 2016), with demonstrated applicability also for studies in Geoscience education (Boniello et al, 2016, Paris et al, 2020. ...
The present paper presents an intervention which was designed and tested, during the COVID-19 quarantine period, in a first-grade class (13 years old students) of the secondary education in a Greek public school. It concerns the use of simple materials for setting up a free fall experiment at home, and the exploitation of the smartphones’ microphone sensor in combination with the phyphox application for taking the needed measurements of time. The findings that emerged from the evaluation of the intervention and the difficulties observed and reported during its implementation are presented in the paper. The opinions and the stances of
the students, about the intervention, as they were revealed through an online questionnaire are also discussed. The findings contribute to the conclusion that the described proposal is a good practice for individual experimentation of students and can be used not only in an environment of distance education but also as a model for assigning individual tasks to students during normal periods of teaching in the classroom.
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