In the present study we employ a combination oflaboratory exercises and simulation. In particular westudied the case of teaching mechanical oscillations toundergraduate students of Polytechnic and Pedagogicaldepartments. Simulations were performed using a generalpurpose package, MATHEMATICA®, which is widelyemployed in our departments, and presents some importantadvantages such as ease of writing mathematical relations,small extent of programs necessary for the solution, ease ofcreating graphical representations/animations. In theemployed process an experimental setup of the physicalsystem is constructed and then using a general purposepackage students construct a model of the system thatalready know from the laboratory experiments. Using thesemodels students produce solutions for various initialconditions, graphical representations of the results as well asanimations corresponding to the time evolution of thesystem. The results show that the above process offers thestudents many different representations of the physicalproblem leading to a better understanding, contribute to thedevelopment of critical spirit and to the familiarization withthe use of ICT.