Full Length Research Paper

Interactive multimedia related to real life, a model to teach physics in high school

Azita Seyed Fadaei¹*, Sara Daraei² and César Mora Ley³

¹Department of Physics, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico.
²Department of Mathematics, Sharif University, Tehran, Iran
³Centro de Investigación en Ciencia Aplicada y Tecnología Avanzada del Instituto Politécnico Nacional,
  Mexico city, Mexico

*Corresponding Author E-mail: seiedf@yahoo.com

Accepted May 13, 2013

Abstract

Students’ understanding of what physics is about, how it is done, and their expectations as to what goes on in a physics course, can play a powerful role in what they get out of learning physics. In this paper with the help of MPEX, we reported on the results of pre and post test in Javan Student Research House, Tehran, Iran. We noted a gap between the expectations of students in experimental group and the control group. During this research experimental group was taught by a mix of approaches (See appendix). This research investigates ‘use of knowledge’ by multimedia where knowledge is taught in specific contexts taken from life and how effectively students are able to transfer their learning of physics concepts across the differing real-life contexts found in interactive multimedia, and finally on to a non-contextual situation. The plan needs a physics computer software context-based student learning material which provides a self-study program in physics for secondary students to use with the support of their teachers. The research was done for 50 high school students (level 11) in 2 groups, one group as experimental group(new approach teaching) and the other group as control group under traditional teaching, the pre and post test were the same for both of them. Students who were target of this research were very successful and their viewpoints about learning physics improved.

Keywords: Teaching physics, high school, real life, interactive multimedia, MPEX.