Pre-laboratory tasks are a best practice for preparing students for learning in the laboratory. Virtual labs, which use virtual reality to place students in an emulation of a physical laboratory where they have the capacity to manipulate equipment and materials as approximations of scientific practice, are emerging as an alternative to the…

Described is a series of five related microcomputer-based laboratory analysis programs that are used by students in a college calculus-based physics course. With minor modifications these programs, which are written in BASIC, could be used in most beginning undergraduate laboratory science courses. (RH)