The Labz Story

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Beyond Labz is a new company built on a much older idea. Brian had the original idea for the virtual labs back in the 1990s when, as a graduate student teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, he realised he was watching students “cookbook” their way through their lab science classes. The students were learning about science rather than learning how to do science.

Brian’s greatest insight was that this wasn’t a general failure of teaching methods or student attitudes; it was in fact a natural consequence of the constraints imposed by safety, time and resources when seeking to educate hundreds of students at a time. Brian realised that a virtual lab could release those constraints, freeing the students from the necessity to do cookbooking in the lab. They would be in an environment that allowed them to make meaningful decisions that have consequences, explore and make mistakes.

Several years, a few generous research grants and an accommodating Department Head later, and the initial virtual labs for Chemistry were born.

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In the intervening 20 plus years, Brian and his research team(s) have extended the breadth and depth of the science simulations, covering not just General Chemistry but also Biology, Physics, Organic Chemistry and Physical Science. Always being careful to adopt the latest and most accurate algorithms for quantitative labs, and to capture and recreate as closely as possible actual results from physical lab experiments for qualitative labs.

The first commercialisation for the lab simulations was contracted out to Pearson, who were exclusive distributors of the labs for many years, selling over 1M CD-ROM based versions into Middle Schools, High Schools and Universities. While the Pearson partnership was very successful in its target market, product investment and innovation lagged.

So when it was time to develop the next generation product, Brian teamed up with Brent and Jay to map out a more ambitious and innovative plan, and Beyond Labz was born.

The flexibility of the Beyond Labz core science simulation platform means that instructors are not restricted to using canned worksheet activity content, they are free to tweak our activities or even author their own experiments. And students are not restricted to only the assigned work, they may freely explore and experiment on their own. This same flexibility enables Beyond Labz simulations to be used in Middle School, High School and University.

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