Lost in Thought

Image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/samwibatt/2876550911/

This is an idea that I used for year 11 students studying DC circuits. All of the students worked in cooperative learning teams of 3 (Killen 1998) and had the opportunity of using the equipment to create a circuit. It was at this stage that I could have moved to the text book, but instead decided to use the knowledge they had learned in the physical world of DC circuits and move to a computer simulation.

Students worked in the same teams of 3 in the computer lab using the LEARN (leading English education and resource network) website OHM ZONE . This computer simulation had a number of advantages over the physical breadboard; namely that the students could set up circuits more quickly, could source more components than we had available in the laboratory and, most importantly, could actually see the direction and intensity of current flow in the circuit.

With the combination of work in the laboratory and on the computers students were able to identify relationship between Voltage, Current and Resistance in their circuits that they might not have done by using only one of these approaches.

Using these two approaches meant that students with different learning styles had the opportunity to maximize their learning.