Authoring-tools for web-based simulations

Abstract

With the appearance of Internet and its applications to education, great interest was developed in supporting learning by this new medium as it offers cheap delivery of materials, easy and comfortable access, etc. With all the possibilities that Internet gives us the idea of integrating simulations into Web pages and materials soon came up. However, simulations are time-consuming, difficult and expensive to produce, especially for the common teacher and without using the suitable tools, as most products for Web page development do no possess the primitives to build simulation items easily. In recent years, several tools have been developed to support the construction of simulations to integrate into Web-based materials. In this paper we review, analyse and contrast some of these tools. As a result of this study, and because we think that this is an area where there is still a lot to be done, we present a set of criteria that we believe Web-based simulation tools should conform to in order to support the work of the author of Web-based educational simulations.