Influence of accuracy of simulations to the physics education

Regular discussion in the LLL (Life Long Learning) courses for the teachers in primary and secondary education gives us insight into their opinion. We discovered that teachers of primary and secondary education in our country believe that the highest retention of knowledge and understanding of mechanics can be achieved in the real world environment (in lab and outdoor) observing the natural physics phenomena and repeating the experiments that led to the physics laws. We know that this is just partially true. It is our belief that simulations using as supplement to real laboratory experiments increase students' understanding of mechanics. Physical processes are often beyond the capability of humans to observe them in schools. Teaching students we have seen that adequate understanding using lab experiments is difficult even in the simplest mechanic phenomena (ball roling on the slope). Students were unable to comprehand the full concept of the physics phenomena from the experiment unless we teach them theory first. In this article, we explain how we used simulations that allow students to adjust the experiments to their comprehantion abilities. We compared the accuracy of three different freeware simulations to the highly accurate proprietary one. We have also analyzed the the observed simulation software to be customized to the accurate transformation of 3D world experiment to the 2D simulated presentation (e.g. the sphere and the cylinder cross-section look equal in 2D screen but the physics background is different).