Teaching Science Using Virtual Experiment

Results and Discussion Due to the poor internet connection in many schools we approached, my group members and I decided to carry out the activity individually with each one taking two pupils at the least. The pupils could be anyone from the upper primary classes regardless which schools they come from. For myself, I happened to pick two pupils; a year 6 girl and a year 5 boy. These two pupils go to the same school in Sekolah Rendah Tumpuan Telisai, Tutong. Before the activity started, I asked them whether they had learnt friction in school. As expected, the year 6 girl, Nurul, said she had but looked forgotten already. The boy, Azizul, first thought friction as “fraction” but was rephrased and at the end he said they have almost finished the syllabus as though he did not understand what I meant. Then I asked them if they remembered rubbing their hands together and then they recalled. I asked them to do it again and asked how they felt after several rubs. They felt the heat as a result of the rubbing. I started the activity with Nurul. I asked her to follow the instructions from the beginning of the activity. But before that I demonstrated one example in case she did not know what to do and showed her the different surfaces and push. For every surface I asked her to predict what was going to happen to the toy car; would it pass the last blue flag or otherwise. Of all her predictions, she managed to get them all correct. After each push I asked her why the toy car did or did not pass the blue flag, and she got the idea of the high and low friction between the surfaces and the toy car. The second part of the activity included a bigger push to the same toy car and same surfaces. As what she did earlier, I asked her to predict beforehand. The instruction stated to push up to the yellow button and observe how far did the toy car travel. Then she used the bigger push and compared the distance with the previous push. I asked her why using the bigger push made the toy car travelled farther than the earlier push. She got the idea that friction became less if we used a bigger push.

For Azizul, he was more active than Nurul. He answered most of my questions with confidence as well as when he predicted what was going to happen to the toy car even a couple of them were 1

incorrect. Similar to Nurul, I asked him to read and follow the instructions at the top of the page. Before he pressed the push button, he predicted of whether the toy car would pass the blue flag or otherwise. The product of his experiment was more or less similar to Nurul only that his prediction for the first activity was wrong for wood surface but he found it himself after he did the experiment. For the second activity, he did quite well as Nurul did and realized about the high and low friction the surfaces produced with the toy car. The final part of the activity was doing the worksheet provided. I asked them to read the instructions and I explained how they should write the answer. The rest of the answers were thought by themselves and my role was only to observe and guide on few things only. After they have finished, I analyzed their answers. They did well in part A question (b) on the texture of each surface and part B on the slope. For question (a), they chose “tile” as the fastest, “grass” came second and “carpet” came third. They both chose differently on the slowest part where Nurul wrote “stone” while Azizul wrote “sand”. Here, it can be judged that even though Azizul was confident on his answer and he might have imagined the situation, but his answer was obviously incorrect compared to Nurul whom have done her PSR examination, meaning that she had more information about the activity. Although the pupils do not use the ICT lab so often, both pupils showed that they managed to handle the procedure given in the task. They used their imaginations quite well in order to predict how far the toy car was going to reach. After all what they had done, using virtual experiments is useful to bring pupils’ imagination to work apart from experiments using concrete. Teachers are recommended to take pupils to the ICT lab more often in order to help enhance their understanding towards the topics they are learning.

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