engleski

Workshops in physics – from kitchen to www

A part of the work on the project Experiment in construction of physical models and concepts will be presented. The project gathers people from different departments and faculties from University of Rijeka (Dept.of Physics Faculty of Philosophy, Dept.of Physics Medical faculty, Dept.of Physics Technical faculty, and elementary school teachers) and consists of three parts – simple experiments in teaching, experiments in modern physics teaching and computer simulations in physics teaching. Workshops on simple experiments in physics use the constructivist approach, which suggests the experiment to be one of the most efficient methods for building concepts and models that make linkage between physical quantities and the natural phenomena. Such an approach gives a valuable tool at all levels of physics teaching, thus allowing us to apply those workshops in primary and secondary schools, in physics teachers training, as well as in teacher's professional development education. So far we have completed four themes with titles A tale about the air, A tale about the equilibrium, How do we see things? and The flow of fluids. Workshops use a serial of simple experiments with everyday materials and objects, upcoming in a line of growing complexity, but with a constant demand that every experiment should be repeatable at home. The first presented experiments usually deal with preconceptions and misconceptions that are frequent for the subject, and are followed by serial of experiments where the new, correctly formed concepts can be employed to shape the models of presented phenomena. The learning environment is pupil centered, collaborative and interactive – participants are just pushed to observe and answer simple questions (while having a possibility to repeat the experiment themselves during the workshop), which help them to form a logical concept and build a model that relate simple phenomena together. The workshops are run by two moderators, one being a university teacher and the other a student, a future physics teacher that participated in preparation of the workshop. Such a team work serves a good purpose of active engagement for the university teacher and the student in the classroom work with children, providing a valuable and new experinece for all parties in the process of education. Since we have had positive results on running pilot workshops for elementary school teachers, the whole workshop project is planned to extend to teacher professional development education. Also, preliminary work is done on preparation and transformation of material to form virtual interactive web workshops that would be uploaded to e-school of physics managed by Croatian Physical Society (http://e-skola.hfd.hr).

constructivism; simple experiments; physics teacher training

nije evidentirano