This entry introduces educational games in secondary schools. Educational games include three main types of educational activities with a playful learning intention supported by digital technologies: educational serious games, educational gamification, and learning through game creation. Educational serious games are digital games that support learning objectives. Gamification is defined as the use of "game design elements and game thinking in a non-gaming context" (Deterding et al. 2011, p. 13). Educational gamification is not developed through a digital game but includes game elements for supporting the learning objectives. Learning through game creation is focused on the process of designing and creating a prototype of a game to support a learning process related to the game creation process or the knowledge mobilized through the game creation process. Four modalities of educational games in secondary education are introduced in this entry to describe educational games in secondary education: educational purpose of entertainment games, serious games, gamification, and game design.
We examine Illinois educational data from standardized exams and analyze primary factors affecting the achievement of public school students. We focus on the simplest possible models: representation of data through visualizations and regressions on single variables. Exam scores are shown to depend on school type, location, and poverty concentration. For most schools in Illinois, student test scores decline linearly with poverty concentration. However Chicago must be treated separately. Selective schools in Chicago, as well as some traditional and charter schools, deviate from this pattern base…
Teaching modern physics in high school is of increasingly importance as it can offer students a more realistic and updated vision of the world, and can provide an opportunity to understand the most recent scientific discoveries. In this context, General Relativity (GR) occupies a prominent place, since it is related to astonishing scientific results, such as the first image of a black hole or the discovery of gravitational waves. In this paper we describe an educational proposal aimed at teaching GR in high school in a fun and playful way using the so-called rubber sheet analogy. We present a …
Exploring the experiences of undergraduate physics students taking a 'Teaching Physics in School' module and the effects on their intentions to become a secondary physics teacher
This paper reviews the history of mobile learning, provides a definition of mobile learning. The properties, advantages and disadvantages of mobile learning, areas of its implementation at the Technical University and mobile learning tools were specified. The aim of the article is the analysis of the modern state of mobile learning and the determination of the conditions of its implementation at the high technical educational institutions. The process of the mobile learning in the national education system is in its formation stage. Nowadays the following stages of its development are formed, …
While non-specialist teaching increasingly becomes an object of public interest, there is little data available on the actual educational background of teachers giving classes outside their specialisation. This work analyses the data collected by the Brazilian Ministry of Education from public and private schools in Alagoas (Brazil), with a special focus on science education at primary and secondary schools. We find that the phenomena of non-specialist teaching is highly subject specific. For instance, while both maths and biology are little affected, more than half of physics classes are give…
In this paper we propose strategies and methodologies of teaching topics in high school physics, through a show of Educational Robotics. The Exhibition was part of a set of actions promoted by a brazilian government program of incentive for teaching activities (PIBID) and whose primary focus is the training of teachers, improvement of teaching in public schools, dissemination of science and formation of new scientists and researchers. By means of workshops, banners and prototyping of robotics, we are able to create a connection between the study areas and their surrounding, making learning mea…
In Mexico, the educative reform that has been taking effect gradually in the secondary school education from 2005, has eliminated some subjects and created other that they concentrate in a single degree of studies the themes of the basic education, waking up changes that represent a challenge for teachers, who besides are adapted to new academic loads, they face an approach different in the treatment from the new themes. Beyond the conflicts that all reform can generate, the present paper is not a political or social analysis, but it approaches some differences between authorities of Secretari…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work and those that do not work for students from different demographics. We sent out a survey to high school physics teachers in the U.S. Midwest states, inquiring about student preparation, pedagogy in the classroom, assessment and professional development. We found that there are differences in the practices of physics teachers in all of these areas, depending …
Astronomy and astrophysics are regarded as highly motivating topics for students in primary and secondary schools, and they have been a recurrent and effective resource to inspire passion about science. In fact, during the last years we have witnessed a boost of facilities providing small robotic telescopes for teachers and students to remotely undertake their own observing projects. A step forward is presented here, where we describe the experience of secondary school students attending professional observations of Venus at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and, in a second observing …
Understanding Of Size And Scale And Order-Of-Magnitude Reasoning In Secondary Science: A Teaching Experiment With Worked Examples As Educational Scaffold
A group of high school students (XII Liceum) in the framework of the Roland Maze Project has built a compact telescope of three Geiger-Muller counters. The connection between the telescope and PC computer was also created and programed by students involved in the Project. This has allowed students to use their equipment to perform serious scientific measurements concerning the single cosmic ray muon flux at ground level and below. These measurements were then analyzed with the programs based on the 'nowadays' knowledge on statistics. An overview of the apparatus, methods and results were prese…
The milq approach to quantum physics for high schools focuses on the conceptual questions of quantum physics. Students should be given the opportunity to engage with the world view of modern physics. The aim is to achieve a conceptually clear formulation of quantum physics with a minimum of formulas. In order to provide students with verbal tools they can use in discussions and argumentations we formulated four "reasoning tools". They help to facilitate qualitative discussions of quantum physics, allow students to predict quantum mechanical effects, and help to avoid learning difficulties. The…
In 1980 Leon Lederman started Saturday Morning Physics with a handful of volunteer physicists, around 300 students and all the physics teachers who tagged along. Today Fermilab offers over 30 programs annually with help from 250 staff volunteers and 50 educators, and serves around 40,000 students and 2,500 teachers. Find out why we bother. Over the years we have learned to take advantage of opportunities and confront challenges to offer effective programs for teachers and students alike. We offer research experiences for secondary school teachers and high school students. We collaborate with e…
Since its serendipitous discovery in 1896 by Henry Becquerel, radioactivity has called the attention of both the scientific community and the broad audience due to its intriguing nature, its multiple applications and its controversial uses. For this reason, the teaching of the phenomenon is considered a key ingredient in the path towards developing critical-thinking skills in many secondary science education curricula. Despite being one of the basic concepts in general physics courses, the scientific teaching literature of the last 40 years reports a great deal of misconceptions and conceptual…
After a primer on nanotechnology and a review of current educational practices in secondary schools, the concept of just-in-time education is proposed to integrate technosciences and humanities so that both future technoscientists and non-technoscientists develop a common understanding, possibly even a common language, to deal with social, ethical, legal, and political issues that arise from the development of nanotechnology and its convergence with other technoscientific developments.
The transition of many educational activities from in-presence to online, due to the Covid-19 emergency, has caused various difficulties to students, especially with regards to maintaining concentration. Even and especially in online mode, it is thus important to pay attention to the interaction with participants. In this context, the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Roma Tre University has proposed a series of activities dedicated to schools that have proven to be able to guarantee the engagement of the participants, also thanks to the game-based learning platform Kahoot!.
A didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the length and orientation of shadows cast by a gnomon, the movement of shadows during daytime in different seasons of the year, and finding the true astronomical North, is fully developed. It also includes a discussion of observations from different frames of reference and of some topics in the history of science to enrich a debate among students, as well as the construction of a simplified model for the apparent displacement of the Sun, and of a sundial, and their use as resources to discuss some common miscon…
Sound is a preferred context to build foundations on wave phenomena, one of the most important disciplinary referents in physics. It is also one of the best-set frameworks to achieve transversality, overcoming scholastic level and activating emotional aspects which are naturally connected with every day life, as well as with music and perception. Looking at sound and music by a transversal perspective - a border-line approach between science and art, is the adopted statement for a teaching proposal using meta-cognition as a strategy in scientific education. This work analyzes curricular propos…
Studying quantum physics in upper secondary school is now a standard practice (Stadermann et al., 2019). But given the context of science education, with low recruitment numbers in higher education and poor attitudes towards science, it remains a question whether students find the learning of quantum physics relevant. In this study, we explore how students perceive the importance of quantum physics and technology and whether their perception changes after an intervention, namely the "Quantum Rules!" visit. We also aim to understand if they overall feel that learning quantum is relevant or not.…
