What is the difference between an electronic courseware and a textbook? Computational tools for teaching scientific subjects

Molnárné Hamvas Lívia dr. <lhamvas@emk.nyme.hu>

Nyugat-Magyarországi Egyetem, EMK,Kémiai Intézet

Molnár József dr.

Berzsenyi D. Evangélikus Gimnázium( Líceum)

Molnár József dr.

Berzsenyi D. Evangélikus Gimnázium (Líceum)

The numbers of those ménages are on the increase extremely nowadays, where children nearly accrete to computer – not only in the USA, but in Europe and in Hungary, too. Spreading of Internet make it necessary for everybody to accept electronic tools in the secondary and university education.

There are lots of websites, where teaching and learning tools, tutorials, all kind of courseware and software and further link collections can be found.

The electronic courseware is located between the virtual world of Internet and printed tutorials and can be very helpful for teaching scientific subjects.

It is not neglectable that these new virtual tools are often more efficient and much rather exciting than traditional teaching aids.

At first overseas entertaining and popular scientific computer-programs were widely used, but it shortly became clear that only software in Hungarian language can be applied effectively to our school education.

Hungarian educational system is greatly different from both European and American methods – therefore the Hungarian educational software have to be created by Hungarian authors instead of translation of ready foreign computer-programs.

What is required to contain a good scientific tutorial?

• First of all a lot of ways are needed for surfing, because courseware is not simply a copied textbook on CD-ROM.

• It has to be conducive to increase student’s skill in solving problems and make possible to control students’ factual knowledge.

• It is to advantage of the software, if the short descriptions of definitions are easily available.

• Lifelike experiments are wanted in the virtual laboratory.

• Detailed descriptions of history of discoveries and illustrated biography of scientists promise to be useful.

We attach importance to eke these conceptions with some others.

• Low-key, unostentatious graphics must be used. Figures and images account for the clearer comprehension of study.

• Knowledge of scientific terminology in foreign languages is very important for Hungarian students. For this reason, it is useful, if some definitions are specified in them.