Grenadines Island is a small island with limited education facilities. Primarily motivated students can easily start their own education. Many people think of education as something that occurs in a school or classroom. However, knowledge-eager students can gain additional skills behind the walls of schools. This self-teaching approach in the “New Pedagogy” is based on motivated people studying outside of general compulsory education. Students should have a chance to acquire other knowledge based on their interests, which are not the interests of their teachers through the self-teaching approach.
The self-teaching project requires an active approach from the student. Students remember competences they gathered through their own endeavors and efforts. Students should look for information and classify it independently. Students should learn to read technical writings of others. In educational-research projects, students are developing a whole spectrum of cognitive abilities – thinking and reasoning, memory and learning, attention, perception, judgment, imagining and problem solving. Research method as the form of education requires individual problem solving of students for an integrated problem assignment.
A virtual nature, virtual universe or virtual reality is essential for the science education. The virtual reality mimics the real world and students can safely perform experiments on it. Students can perform thought experiments otherwise impossible to do in reality. Moreover, a computation is becoming as important as a theory and experiment. Technology, the use of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, has a profound impact on the way we live. A powerful method of science and research endeavor brings us every aspect of our comfort. Therefore, I propose a four-level educational architecture which is divided into four levels.
The first level is for casual students who are interested in nothing more than in animations that are suitable for public presentations. Students in the second level will use an existing simulation program, change input parameters and look for results. Third level students will be more interested and will read technical information written in the second part of this thesis to get a better insight. The four-level architecture culminates with students reading, programming, analyzing and expanding galaxy dynamics simulations, and with a deep understanding of numerical simulations.