QUESTION FOR CURRENT SCIENCE EDUCATION: VIRTUAL OR REAL?

The feasible real experiments should not be in any way eliminated from school laboratory practice. This is the permanent starting point of all approaches to natural science curricula, and it is still in force. The real living environment makes us face more and more items of the virtual environment, worlds, mediated by infinite possibilities of computer networks. The mediated perception through virtual images has become (thanks to the massive spread of information technologies) the major cognitive channel of school age pupils. Direct utilization of information from an objectively existing reality is steadily superseded and replaced by virtual information. Six years ago we asked on the first pages of JBSE Nr. 1 (Bilek, 2010): How to blend an effective and meaningful application of real, indirect and simulative observation, measuring and experimenting according to didactic principles? Do we have to answer now or do we know directions where can we find the answer?