Welcome to Go-Lab! Go-Lab is the ecosystem for inquiry learning with online laboratories for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) domains. This quick guide gives you a short overview of Go-Lab’s components and facilities and enables you to start using them now.
First, you may want to check out this short video that gives an overall impression of Go-Lab.
Which tasks will Go-Lab help me with?
As a STEM-teacher, using the Go-Lab ecosystem you can create online inquiry experiences for your students. Go-Lab helps in:
- Finding online laboratories for student experimentation. Go-Lab offers more than 600 labs from all over the world in one portal. You can select labs based on domain, student age range, language etc.
- Embedding these labs into a complete online lesson (called an Inquiry Learning Space, ILS) that next to the lab offers students learning apps (that help in the inquiry process) and other multimedia material.
- Distributing Inquiry Learning spaces to students and monitoring the learning process by means of learning analytics.
What components does Go-Lab consist of?
The Go-Lab ecosystem consists of the two main components:
- Golabz is the platform you’re using now. This is the sharing platform, where you can find a large collection of online laboratories, inquiry learning applications, and ready-to-use Inquiry Learning Spaces. It also provides a Support area, where you can find a large number of demo-videos and how-to content.
- Graasp is an independent authoring and learning platform integrated with Golabz. Here you can create your own Inquiry Learning Spaces and share these with your students.
What learning tools will I find in Go-Lab?
The Go-Lab Ecosystem offers the following learning tools:
- Online labs are digital simulations that often mimic laboratory situations and in which students can perform experiments in a digital way. The Go-Lab Ecosystem provides the largest collection of over 600 online labs, coming from resources from all over the world. You can access the labs through the main navigation on top of the page (“Labs”) and search labs using the filters on the right of the page.
- Inquiry Learning Apps are small digital tools guiding students through the inquiry learning process and assisting them at every step. For example, there are tools helping to formulate hypotheses, design experiments, visualise experiment data, draw conclusions, and many more. Learning analytics and collaborative learning tools are available as well. You can access the list of apps through the main navigation on top of the page (“Apps”).
- Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) are digital spaces that can be created with help of the Go-Lab Ecosystem. Each ILS represents a structured learning scenario helping students discover a certain STEM topic through a process of inquiry learning. An ILS typically contains an online lab, several inquiry learning apps, and any learning content of your choice. You can find over 1,000 ready-to-use ILSs using the main navigation on top of the page (“Spaces”).
What you will not find in Go-Lab is multimedia material (videos, texts etc.). You will need to bring those in yourself, but with Graasp you can very easily include multimedia material of your own in an ILS.
How do I start using Go-Lab?
At the first step, we recommend having a look at the available tools and content in Golabz, as described above (use the main navigation to access lists of labs, apps, and spaces). For each tool, you will find a description and a “Preview” button located on the right of the page, so you can get a first impression.
Once you get acquainted with Golabz, you might want to create your first Inquiry Learning Space. You will need an account for this. Click the “Sign in/Sign up” button on top right of the page. You will be forwarded to Graasp. Here you can connect to your Graasp account, if you already have one, or create a new account (for both Golabz and Graasp) by clicking “Sign Up”. You will only need to provide your name and e-mail-address and set a password.
Now you are ready to use Go-Lab in the full range of its facilities!
To get a quick introduction to Graasp, please visit this page
How do I create an Inquiry Learning Space?
Basically, there are three ways to create an ILS.
- The easiest way is to use an existing ILS as a starting point. You can find over 1,000 ready-to-use ILSs using the main navigation on top of the page (“Spaces”). Use the filters on the right of the page to specify your search. Once the suitable ILS is chosen, use the “Duplicate space” button to create your own copy of the ILS and adapt it in Graasp for your teaching.
- Alternatively, an ILS can be created from an online lab. You can access the list of labs through the main navigation on top of the page (“Labs”) and search labs using the filters on the right of the page. Select the lab you like to use and click the “Create Space” button. This will bring you to a new ILS in Graasp, with the lab you selected already contained in it.
- Finally, you can click “Create ILS” button in Graasp, which gives you a new ILS with the five standard Go-Lab inquiry phases in place. Then you can populate these phases with multimedia material, apps, and labs.
In order to learn how to create an ILS and how to populate it with content, please visit this page.
Where do I find support?
In order to learn how to use the Go-Lab ecosystem, please visit our Support area, where you can find a large number of demo-videos, step-by-step guides, and how-to pages.
In case of technical issues, please use this contact form.
