Pages 123-130, Language: English, GermanWelk, Alexander/Splieth, Christian/Rosin, M./Kordaß, Bernd/Meyer, G.Apart from a requirement to acquire more and more academic knowledge, during their training, dental students need to acquire a full range of highly precise manual and technical skills, including excellent hand/eye coordination, to enable them to visualize and understand how to prepare cavities, prior to placing restorations. Furthermore, unlike medical students, dental students are in the position of administering treatment to patients very early in their training. The increasing academic workload means that these skills have to be mastered in a short space of time.
This you will gain in the future only through the use of effective methods of the educations - for example by the use of the computer-assisted dental simulators (DentSim/DenX), which serves the visual-, audio- and practical learning channel simultaneously. Unlike the conventional phantom heads, the DentSim-unit has the following advantages
- the acquisition of knowledge takes place in a multimedia learning environment with a high audio-visual content and degree of interaction and complexity,
- problem-oriented learning takes place through clinically relevant work,
- individual students can work to personalized programs through the digital tutor function,
- two-dimensional knowledge is transferred into three-dimensional spatial work,
- three-dimensional preparations can be easily analysed by two-dimensional error analysis.
- all preparation exercises are recorded for error and effectiveness analysis.
Apart from student training, the computer- assisted simulators can also be used for the evaluation of the effectiveness or the quality control of various teaching methods in the context of Evidence Based Dental Education.
Keywords: computer-assisted dental simulator, dental simulation, computer- assisted preparation exercises, digital tutor function, problem-oriented learning, evidence based dental education