i am excited and happy to share that a paper co-authored with my student Koh Shao Wei will be read at this year's Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC 2022), which will be held from the 30th of May to the 1st of June.
our paper is titled Learning dynamics in physics with Lego Mindstorms® robots.
its abstract reads:
In the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (SCGCE O-Level) Science and Physics syllabus, Dynamics is a required topic to be read by students. In a bid to pique students’ interest on this topic, we have developed an activity involving Lego Mindstorms® to introduce the topic in a more hands-on and novel way. Students will be able to witness for themselves the effects of forces (provided by the Lego Mindstroms®) on objects. Palm-sized moveable robots built and coded with Lego Mindstorms® exert forces on an everyday object such as a tissue box. We conducted experiments to determine the relationship between the percentage-power and the force exerted by each robot. A pair of such robots were used in push and pull experiments on the tissue box. Depending on the students’ familiarity with Dynamics, they can be tasked to code the robots and / or predict the observable effects on the tissue box as the pair of robots act on the latter. This activity is work-in-progress and is planned to be conducted with students from a local secondary school during the first half of 2022. Data gathered will be analysed to assess the effectiveness of the activity in inciting students’ interests in the topic of Dynamics.
