Websites for Physics Demonstrations and Computer Simulations: A Non-Educational Quality Evaluation

Scientific disciplines including mathematics, physics, and chemistry tend to adopt online resources, including websites and web applications, to demonstrate physical experiments and simulate scientific phenomena that are hard to observe and investigate in real world. The present study examined the existing collections of the websites and web applications created in academics for physics demonstrations and computer simulations. The present study discovered the existing collections of websites lack update and more recent resources. The present study conducted a state-of-the-art literature review to amend, update, and supplement the existing collection of the websites for physics demonstrations and computer simulations to a comprehensive one. Reviewing the websites in the collection, the present study uncovered the necessity of an evaluation of their non-educational quality while their educational quality has been extensively examined by the previous studies. Website quality evaluation emerged two decades ago and has been implemented based on various evaluation models including those originated from the software product quality standards as a website shares similar features with traditional software product. Incorporating with the Web-QEM model, the present study evaluated the non-educational quality, including the external quality and the quality in use, of 38 websites for physics demonstrations and simulations, and the purposively selected six cases from them, respectively. The present study discerned a moderate level of external quality of the evaluated websites on average. However, the usability and general functionality of the websites for physics demonstrations and simulations displayed unacceptable quality level while the content quality remained moderate and the websites perform reliably and efficiently in general. The present study also uncovered a moderate-high level of quality in use of the selected websites for physics simulations. Based on the evaluation results, the present study suggested 35 best-practice principles for improving the non-educational quality of the websites for physics demonstrations and simulations and better creating the new ones