Web-prepared exercises for experiment courses

Xie Ning, Ba Pu and Jiang Xiangdong
Southwest Jiaotong University
Chengdu, China

Many science and technology courses in colleges or universities have experiment units, some of which involve students carrying out experiments after lectures while others are independent courses. The latter type -- experiment courses -- has become more common with the economic boom, the increase in the number of instruments and a greater emphasis on experimental work. When students come to experiment classes, however, they often have not prepared well and simply browse the instructions after they arrive; and their teachers do not know what the students have already learned.

As preparation is necessary for both teachers and students, we have devised a website which includes exercises for preparing for experiment courses. The exercises not only alert students to the fact that they should prepare for experiments before doing them and highlight any difficulties in experiments but also give teachers more information about what their students already know.

The system designed allows teachers to develop the exercises on, for example, MS Word and then upload them on an image file, with each exercise file in a fixed format. What the teacher has uploaded is stored; some keywords are provided in a database according to the experiment unit and group; and questions are set randomly for each student.

This Web preparation exercise system was implemented for a physics experiment course using MS Asp technology, an Access database in the back stage and JavaScript in the front stage. There are about 4,000 students on the course and they carry out six or seven experiments every semester for one year. So far, the system has received positive responses from students and teachers. The students think that using the preparation system saves them time and helps them to grasp the relevant knowledge; and the teachers feel that the increased understanding of what students know helps them to plan and implement their experiment classes.