Basically, you must make the time valuable to learning science. In this particular example, you might have arranged to have old-fashioned in-class, hands-on experiments. The hands-on alternative is not always available for reasons of time, safety, space, and money. As nice as the Adaptive Curriculum object is, it misses one essential ingredient for science investigation: reality. You and the students know that the objects (towel, newspaper, sandpaper) are not real. They are only representations that may not truly mimic what you’d see if you did the experiments for real. Your data will be too perfect as well. Doing real-world experiments gives you data with noticeable random error and often somewhat ambiguous results.

Having perfect data gives students the impression that science functions in a perfect world. Student science investigations (aka “labs”) should always take students into reality rather than away from it.

There’s no technological barrier to providing the same capabilities as you see in Adaptive Curriculum but with real experiments in place of phony ones. Experiments could be prerecorded with many, many variations. Students could even take data point by point from the moving object to get the distance-time graph of motion and learn more than just how far the object moves or how much time it takes.

Huge amounts of money are being spent creating phony experiments like those in Adaptive Curriculum. Resources would be better spent on building real-world investigations. If you’re going to the trouble of using computers in a classroom, you should have the best possible science experience, and that experience should always include learning more about the nature of science, improving scientific reasoning skills, and understanding the complexity and ambiguity of empirical work.

Take a look at http://www.smartscience.net/howtouse to see one way to use prerecorded real experiments.