Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
I like teaching science when we can watch machines and take nature walks and observe the animals in the park and the zoo – but when it comes time to break out the gears and the chemicals, I’m out. I don’t like having to think through those things, and I don’t even want to follow the directions in a well-written book. I want someone else to do it for me – and that’s where the Virtual, Interactive Homeschool Laboratory from Greg Landry’s Homeschool Science comes in.
When I first heard about a virtual lab, I couldn’t picture it. How could doing something online take the place of learning how a real lab works? For hands-on learners, maybe it’s a hard thing – but for those of us who do not want dead animals in my kitchen – or on my property at all – it’s definitely a great prospect.
In the interest of full disclosure, I think my son would be okay with doing an in-person dissection, even though he’s a total softy. When it comes right down to it, he’s learned to man-up, so to speak, and I think he could look at the process objectively and scientifically. Me, on the other hand? I never had to do dissection labs in school, and I have a total aversion to dead things, so even though a biology lab consists of lots of other labs in addition to the traditional dissections, I’d much rather avoid the whole lot.
Greg Landry’s Virtual, Interactive Homeschool Laboratory consists of eleven labs. Each lab session has a video to watch beforehand, where Greg gives instructions and explains what you’re going to do. There are also a few videos to watch before getting started that explain how the lab area works and how to do a lab report.
The lab area is awesome! Students log into a site that looks like someone animated a lab. Drawers are labeled, tools are available, and directions are listed on the left side of the screen. The directions are super detailed, too – you begin by turning on the lights in the lab! The next step is to put on your lab coat and goggles, and the images reflect all of these things. I love that detail – he’s keeping the kids conscious of safety and teaching them how to use real lab procedures even though there’s nothing dangerous about doing these labs digitally.
Working through the lab itself is pretty cool. Basically, you follow all of the directions on the left side of the screen in the lab itself on the right. You manipulate all of the materials by clicking and dragging them from place to place. For example, you can open a drawer by clicking on it, and then you move any of the items inside that drawer by dragging them to an workspace on the lab counter. When you’re finished with it, you can put it away by clicking on that object’s ‘put away’ button. Isn’t that cool? You can manipulate all of the objects that way, so that the lab is always fully prepared for whichever lab you choose to do. You’ll never set fire to it, forget to turn off your Bunsen burner, and you never have to worry about anyone doing anything gross to the frogs! This is totally my kind of biology lab.
The videos leading into each experiment feel pretty detailed. Greg Landry takes the time to share about the big principles, of science and of life, in these videos. He teaches needed math skills and sets up the student for what is needed to know. These are huge bonuses in a digital class, I think.
Students are expected to complete a lab report for each experiment. This is where we began to have issues with this program. While there is a detailed video about how to complete a lab report, and while I’m quite comfortable helping with that nice paper-based component, there isn’t a template contained anywhere in this course that I can find. As this was really My Little Man’s first attempt at this type of lab report, I would have preferred to have at least one template – but preferably several – digital templates that he could download and fill in. I feel that this would have helped him learn how to make this look professional and understand the basic structure and expectations of a lab report. Without a template, there is nothing in this course for visual learners to see what a lab report should look like – and if I didn’t have years of science classes under my belt, it would have been confusing for me, too. We could have created our own template and listened to the video a few times to get all of the pieces he suggested right, which is doable but would have taken a chunk of time – and we were crunched. Instead, I found a template with directions elsewhere and My Little Man used that. This worked wasn’t a big deal for us, but if I were a paying customer instead of merely a reviewer, I’d prefer to have everything I need available in the class.
The only other issue we had was in the preparation for the experiment itself. As a high school student, when we did an experiment, it was clear why we were doing this – what we were trying to learn or determine. For some of these experiments, that doesn’t appear to be clear. For example, the very first lab seems to exist solely for students to learn how to measure and use the lab. That’s fine, but I’m not sure how I’d personally word the hypothesis, if I were the one actually doing the lab, and do you then include the data charts just because? This part seemed a bit extraneous. When it comes to the frog dissection lab, however, it’s clear that the point of the lab is for the student to examine the internal organs and learn their purpose. As you work through the lab, handy dandy text boxes even pop up to help with this! I do love that part – but I think it should be clear why you’re doing the experiment in the first place, even if that is just a sharing of a hypothesis or overall question.
We’re working through these labs slowly as we’re using them to supplement another biology course. I think this is a great way to get lab credit, though, especially without the weird smells, mess, or stress! Don’t take my word for it, though – click on the banner below to read other reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew.
Are you interested in other resources for teaching high school science at home? Check out my review for How to Get Out of Teaching High School Science here.
