Templates for interactive simulations in electronics lessons

The use of standard designs or templates can help to reduce the development time for computer based lessons. Work with an authoring package distributed to the Scottish FE community has led to the development of a design for interactive simulations which can be incorporated into lesson designs. This is particularly useful when the package is being used to teach topics where one or more graphs need to be drawn interactively as the learner experiments. The designs have been used to create simulations in lessons on a variety of subjects. The purpose of the techniques discussed is not to supplant standard simulation packages, but to provide the learner with limited variation experiments with a consistent user interface which illustrate the theoretical topics in a lesson. The student, therefore, does not have to learn a new package for each new simulation. The student´s learning environment on the computer should normally provide additional access to conventional simulation packages which provide experience in using more complex simulation tools. One approach to minimising confusion which can occur when switching between lessons and such packages is to get the lesson to load the simulation with the circuit or other example which is to be the subject of the practical exercise. Another is to have different screen recordings of simulations played back in response to students´ answers