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.
