Dear Go-Lab teachers,

Welcome to the first 2022 Go-Lab newsletter. At many places in the world schools and universities are fully opening again. Let’s hope that this situation will stay this way. Despite that we can now luckily engage with our students f2f digital education now has a prominent role, and Go-Lab is one of the facilities that is often used.

In this newsletter we have some news to report on Go-Lab.

ILS news

The number of published ILSs now has passed the 1600!

ILS #1600 is an ILS about Ohms Law and interestingly this is our first ILS in Bahasa Indonesian. The author is Fuad Tamami, a master student from Lombok, who found Go-Lab at the internet and is fully Go-Lab autodidact.

App news

In the past period two new apps were added.

The Questionnaire construct app summarizes the results of student answers on a questionnaire in the form of scores on a set of constructs. For each construct (e.g., motivation or interest) scores on a number of items is combined into one qualification (e.g., high, average, low). With this app, each student can inspect his or her qualification on each construct (e.g., motivation is high, interest is average etc.). In the app, the teacher can create the constructs and indicate which questions from the questionnaire belong to a specific construct. For each construct up to seven levels (e.g., very high, high, etc.) can be specified and the range of summed scores belonging to each level can be determined (e.g., very high is 90% and up). Defining the labels for the constructs and for the levels is fully up to the teacher. This is a teacher app that best is situated in the teacher dashboard in Graasp.

In an ILS, when in collaborative mode, students could already chat with each other in the group in which the teacher had placed them. We have now extended this facility with a sound and (and soon) video chat. This Conference app allows students to communicate with their peers in the same collaboration groups, through a voice call, within an ILS. These groups are defined using the Collaboration Tool. Learners can join and leave the call whenever they want. In the near future, this app will also support video calls.

Lab news

UT has published two new labs on quantum physics. In the tunneling lab students can investigate how a potential energy barrier influences the phenomenon of tunneling of a wave packet. Students can change the total energy, wavelength, and width of the wave packet; plus the height and width of the potential energy barrier and different outputs are shown. In the double slit lab, students can investigate the wave behavior of quantum particles. The simulation allows students to change different settings of the slits or barrier, visualize the interference pattern and the individual detection of particles through a detector, see the probability profiles of the wave function in two dimensions, and visualize the real and imaginary parts of the wave function.

We have also started to add an excellent series of Korean labs, called JavaLab. The topics include Physics, Chemistry, Earth science, Astronomy, Biology, Measurement, and Mathematics. Currently the speed of the labs is not very high, the lab owner has announced that probably mid 2022 they will move to a faster server. Adding the JavaLab labs will bring the number of available labs at Golabz to over 1000.

The new Graasp

The graasp.eu open-access digital education platform is using legacy technologies that EPFL can no longer maintain. A new open-source version of Graasp (graasp.org), simpler and more sustainable, has been released and is currently being polished. Starting this summer, we recommend all Go-Lab users to move to graasp.org for their new online activities. We will publish instructions on how to make the transition from graasp.eu to graasp.org in June (using zip files). There will be neither backward compatibility nor user, content, or data transfer. We will keep graasp.eu alive as long as possible (at least until December 2022), but without any guaranty. For that reason, we strongly recommend that you download the content of your ILSs as a zip file as soon as possible (see the ‘download as zip’ option under the chevron at the icon of your ILS in Graasp). You can then later use this zip file to rebuild your ILS under the new Graasp.

Feel free to register and use graasp.org. Spaces, ILS, and Activities are now the same type of items and are called Folders. The default interface corresponds to the previous authoring view. To see the interface corresponding to the previous “Standalone” view, just press the “Play” button. Accesses are configured using the “Sharing” preferences. The core apps are currently updated to be made compatible with graasp.org and will be added as links. More complex apps can possibly be added later if new resources are found to do so. Do not hesitate to contact denis.gillet@epfl.ch for questions regarding the transition.

Diana Dikke, Denis Gillet, and Ton de Jong                                    

Go-Lab coordinating team