Teaching parabolic motion with stop-action animations

• Autores: W. Church, B. Gravel, C. Rogers
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 23, no. 5, 2007, págs. 861-867
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Historically, teachers determine the mental models that students have of various concepts by asking them to write. In physics, teacherswill use lab reports and class tests, with variable success, to encourage the students to critically examine their mental models and towrite about them. With the increasing accessibility of movie making, we have found a new avenue for students to examine and to reporttheir models, and this new avenue is often more intriguing to the student. The goal of a lab report is for the students to tell a story, andthrough that story, critically examine their understanding of the subject. Having a student report on the outcome of an experiment,however, does not always lead to a change in student understanding. And, in extreme cases, a report can lead to the students changingtheir memory of the experiment to fit their incorrect mental model. Therefore, many teachers have the students predict first and thencompare their predictions with their results. In the movie-making program, we try to take this a step further. We can use the movieenvironment to encourage students to build a simulation of their experiment and test their model against experimental data. As inengineering, this process relies upon strong fundamental math and science knowledge. In the classroom, generating animations serves asa way to strengthen conceptual understanding. Using the animation design process, we have found students (and teachers) to be farmore interested in the outcome of their work. This paper shows some of the results of this technique by looking at how high schoolstudents have learned about parabolic motion in a physics class. In particular, we will highlight the work of select students to showwhat they were able to do through making a movie.