Work

Point and Click or Build by Hand: Comparing the Effects of Physical vs. Virtual Materials on Middle School Students' Ability to Optimize an Engineering Design - eScholarship

Year: 2005

Type: article

Abstract: The widespread availability of computers in science classrooms makes them an appealing instructional medium.However, the embodied nature of cognition would seem to suggest that the type of materials (i.e., whether they are physical or virtual) would influence students' learning.However, Triona and Klahr (2003) found that elementary school children learned how to design unconfounded experiments equally well when trained on either physical materials (using real springs and weights) or virtual materials (using a computer presentation of springs and weights).In the present study, we compared the effect of using either physical or virtual materials in an engineering design task in which middle school students had to determine the most effective properties of "mousetrap cars".On a variety of measures, we found that physical and virtual materials were also equally effective at facilitating substantive learning about the domain.

Source: eScholarship (California Digital Library)

Authors: David Klahr, Lara M. Triona, Cameron Williams

Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz

Language: English

Topic: Science Education and Pedagogy

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: Fundamentals of Experimental Science in Early Science Education