Microcontrollers in Physics education: a circuit simulation ... - ICL

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Conference ICL2010 September 15 -17, 2010 Hasselt, Belgium finished, was compared to the knowledge students had before the teaching. A pre-test was given to the students before the trial, in order to identify what they already knew about electric circuits and the movement of electrons. All the internationally accepted practices for performing research in science education were followed. The questionnaire was carefully designed (and was related to the content taught), and effort was paid so as the question to with clearly stated and specific questions. This is very important in order to avoid systematic errors. Children form their first ideas about electric current at a very early age, as electric current is an important part of everyday life. Most of these ideas are not scientifically correct. To avoid further misconceptions coming from the teacher, it was decided to first test this new device together with the new e-learning platform (www.garyfallidou.org) with students of the 4 th grade of primary school (10 years old), as formal Physics teaching starts at the 5 th grade of primary school. It was decided that, for the educational trial it would be more beneficial to the students to work in pairs. This was done in order to allow students communicate and cooperate with each other. The educational trial is still going on in primary schools that have been randomly selected. In this paper only some preliminary results from a group of 19 students will be presented. . A few weeks after the activities, the post-test was given to the students to measure the remaining knowledge. This took an hour, but it was necessary, as it is the only way to evaluate the success of the new teaching approach with the use of the new device. Data analysis of the post–tests questions (identical as it happens to those of the pre-test) followed. The educational evaluation of the new teaching approach emerges from the comparison between the pre and post-tests results. 4.1. Data analysis All relevant statistics were calculated using specially constructed software, interfaced with a popular computational and plotting package. The statistical variance was computed and the Bessel-corrected standard deviation was calculated for all data points to be presented. The systematic error was set at 2.5%. The total error was then computed by adding in quadrature our systematic with our statistical errors, these two being independent, by definition. The data are presented in double histograms, depicting the percentage of students holding a particular idea. The red circles represent the students’ ideas in the pre-test while the blue triangles the students’ ideas after the educational trial. The error bars on each point of the histogram represent one total standard deviation on either side of the point, as computed for this single point. The numerical values of the data are given on the histogram, staggered on either side of the points (for the pre-test red circles they are on the left side, whereas on for the post-test-blue triangles they are given on the right). In some of the questions, students were allowed to offer more than one answer. For that reason, it is possible (for some of the questions presented) the sum of the percentages to addup to something above 100. ICL 2010 Proceedings – Page 415 6(12)
Conference ICL2010 September 15 -17, 2010 Hasselt, Belgium 4.2. Question 1: In which of the following pictures will the lamp glow? 120 Picture 3. 100 80 84,2 60 40 20 0 0,0 22,2 5,6 0,0 0,0 33,3 10,5 5,6 11,1 11,1 5,3 0,0 5,3 61,1 47,4 11,1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Picture 4. red circles: the pre-test, blue triangles post test 26,3 There is not one but three of the above pictures where the lamp will glow; therefore the students answer for each of the pictures individually as to if the lamp will shine or not. The diagram depicts the percentages of the students that considered each picture as correct. On the post-test there is an improvement on the percentage of the students that answered (4) which is one of the three correct answers. In the pre-test only 33.3% (±27.5%) of the students recognizes the correct answer, while in the post-test the percentage becomes 84.2% (±26.4%). In fact this was precisely the circuit that the students had built with their own hands during the lesson. It was stressed that in order to make a light bulb illuminate it should be connected with the battery at two points a) on the side of the screw and b) under the base. Nevertheless, no other successful connections rather than the one depicted in (4) were presented to the students, and this seems to indicate with a high level of certainty that this is the reason they failed to identify the rest of the connections which would result to the lamp shining. It seems ICL 2010 Proceedings – Page 416 7(12)
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Microcontrollers in Physics education: a circuit simulation ... - ICL

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