Using Virtual Instrumentation in Romanian Secondary Education

ICT is playing an important role in the area of instrumentation nowadays. Started with an “old-fashioned” connection between an individual instrument and a computer, which provides the opportunity to display of measurement data on a virtual instrument panel, today, the VI applications can interfere with human activities in a very accurate way. In the last years, commercial software products for the development of virtual instrumentation systems appeared at a large scale. Most of them proposed graphical programming methods for their using and application developing. This fact made also to take VIs into consideration as an important option for the educational environment. In Romania, the Ministry of Education, Research and Innovation created a strategy for implementing in education of the graphical programming environments and measuring computer systems. Started in 2002 with the introduction in several high schools of LabVIEW full development licenses, the teachers’ and pupils’ interest for promoting the use of virtual experiments in their classrooms became a real fact. The Socrates Comenius 2.1 European Project “VccSSe Virtual Community Collaborating Space for Science Education” (128989-CP-1-2006-1-RO-COMENIUS-C21) has provided an important opportunity for the Science secondary teachers to be introduced and trained in the world of virtual instrumentation. This paper tries to emphasize on the main aspects of the introducing of the virtual instrumentation in Romanian education, presenting also the main aspects of virtual experiments promoting in Dambovita County.