Resumen de Laurel vs Hardy: a PBL activityfor motivating first year university students in physics
J. I. G. Gurtubay, J. Sáenz, G.A. López
We report an experience where first year students of the subject “General Physics” must modela leisure event observable in daily life using simple concepts already studied. Considering students’different backgrounds, one of the aims of this activity is to motivate and engage them by showingthat the Physics they learn is able to explain many simple daily life phenomena. As it is often done inscience, they must also be aware of the advantage of modelling a complex problem by starting witha simpler one. In particular, the example they had to explain is the following: two cyclists, a fat one(Oliver Hardy) and a skinny one (Stan Laurel) ride downhill on a bike without pedalling. Who goesfaster and why? The activity was programmed to be solved in a 50-minute lecture where the studentshad to work in teams of 3 to encourage team-work and the habit of discussion. The students got thesetting of the problem a few days before so they could work in advance on the driving question andreview the concepts they needed to use. In order to check the previous work done at home, the dayof the lecture, they answered a 4-question multiple choice Kahoot quiz during the first minutes ofthe session. During the next 30 minutes, the students worked in teams discussing their ideas andsolving the problem, which they had to hand in so that the lecturer could later identify weaknessesin their reasoning. Afterwards, their learning process was re-evaluated using another Kahoot quizand finally the lecturer solved the problem in the blackboard. The results of the first quiz showedthat the students had not worked hard enough preparing the session. However, the second quizdemonstrated that after their discussion about the topic and the explanations by the instructors,they had significantly advanced in their learning process, answering correctly to the key questions.This activity was rated as very useful by most of the students, as it allowed them to identify theirweaknesses and strengths in solving problems.
