CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS, vol.96, no.7, pp.745-750, 2018 (SCI-Expanded)
Existence of a wide variety of virtual laboratories leads to dilemmas among practitioners in terms of selection of such programs and their adaptation to the subject matter in the pre-service and in-service teacher training processes. The aim of this study is to inform physics educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers of the virtual labs used in teaching physics nowadays, as well as the scope, design, and features of such software. They are used in teaching physics, particularly from primary education to the university level, are introduced and compared, their superior and weak aspects are highlighted, and target audiences, design characteristics, scopes and details, experiment analyses levels, levels of proximity to reality, and user friendliness are presented considering the data obtained from the literature review carried out based on the content analysis method. Thus, this study is intended to contribute to utilization of virtual physics labs by users with expected efficiency.