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s based on literature show that students have difficulties on conceptual understanding in physics education and many students’ conception about the topic of projectile motion is based on impetus theory that is also called as pre-Newtonian mechanics. The most common alternative conceptions of students about projectile motion are stated from the review of the research findings as the following:

A fired object firstly follows the way of firing direction and then, the object drops straight down by the effect of gravity (McCloskey, 1982).

When an object dropped from a plane, it tends to drop straight down (Millar & Kragh, 1994).

The gravity effecting on falling objects is more than the gravity effecting on stationary objects (Thagard, 1992; Vosniadou, 1994).

These types of beliefs are resulted from the students’ misinterpretation of their observed everyday activities and educators have used different methods, theories and strategies to eliminate these consequences. At that point, experimentation has an important role on scientific knowledge and understanding of science and I think laboratory applications give opportunity for students to translate their observation about everyday situations to experiments. So, science teaching and learning cannot be thought separately from laboratory work.

I specially preferred to study about this topic because in the literature, there is no much study related with laboratory applications of projectile motion, especially, no findings that compares the effectiveness of hands-on experimentation with simulated experimentation when measuring the students’ conceptual understanding of projectile motion.

The intent of this section is to provide perception through orderly and exactly review of the literature about the effectiveness of computer simulations in physics education. Research findings will be reviewed that include: the purpose of the laboratory works in physics education, the use of computer technology to support learning in physics education, and under this title; computer simulated experimentation versus hands-on experimentation.

The Purpose of the Laboratory Works in Physics Education

Activities based on observations, tests and experiments are generally named as laboratory applications in teaching the natural sciences and in physics curriculum, laboratories have been an essential component for more than a century. We can find so many studies in the literature that are describing the purposes of laboratory applications on many perspectives. So, Novak (1970) categorized them into four main perspectives, these are (as cited in Trumper, 2003): skills, concepts, the nature of science, and attitudes. When I compare the contextual purpose of each term with the general goals of science teaching, I see that they are very similar. So, it can be said that laboratory work was commonly valued as the primary income of teaching science.

Laboratories provides opportunity to conduct scientific experiments and they are also excellent settings for teaching and learning science since they provide opportunities for learners to develop their critical and inquiry thinking, discussing, and problem solving abilities. According to Thornton (1987), laboratory applications are placed less emphasis upon in courses since many experiment equipments are hard to use, fragile, unrelia