Biological Sciences (61) The Virtual Biochemistry Laboratory is a comprehensive, fully interactive, three-dimensional laboratory course (on CD-ROM) in biological chemistry for college undergraduate students. This virtual laboratory provides the opportunity for students to conduct virtual experiments, thus it acquaints students with laboratory techniques and procedures enabling them to perform the same or similar experiments in an actual laboratory. Secondary benefits include precautionary training in the handling of dangerous and/or expensive reagents. More than this, however, the virtual laboratory offers a "warehouse of parts" within which students can work independently to explore essential questions about biological systems and seek answers to these questions by means of experiments they design and conduct. The Virtual Biochemistry Laboratory uses the programming language Java, including Java 3D and JavaBeans and is based on the component model of software design. The design of the Virtual Laboratory provides total independence to the student user for the planning and execution of experiments and the analysis of the resulting data. The software is sufficiently general that it can be adaptable to any typical biochemistry laboratory experiment. This generality and flexibility permits students to ask essential questions about biological systems, to define subsidiary questions that elaborate on the essential questions, and then to use the "warehouse of parts" in the virtual laboratory to design experiments that will provide answers to those questions. In this way, under guidance from the instructor and via collaboration with peers, students learn to problem-solve, not only via the application of the scientific method, but also via the processes of self-reflection, trial and error, and the construction of a body of knowledge that emerges as students link practice and theory while integrating lectures, labs and readings in the process of doing virtual experiments.
