High School Students Group Interaction with the Electric Field Hockey Interactive Simulation

Abstract

This study investigates a group of high school students in a physics classroom interacting with a computer simulation that simulates the electrostatic interaction as a hockey game, the Electric Field Hockey. The activity featured in this study took place prior to the students receiving formal instruction about the electric field. The learning goal was to allow students to explore the simulated electrostatic phenomena. The study asks the following research question: How do high school students collectively explore simulated electrostatic phenomena while interacting with the Electric Field Hockey computer simulation during a classroom activity? In this paper, through careful analysis of classroom videos, I present a case study about the group mentioned above. The results show that high school students encountered and dealt with multiple types of tensions in the activity and explored the electrostatic phenomena simulated by the Electric Field Hockey. Students prioritized exploring different types of phenomena when they encountered different types of tensions. Based on the findings I propose: When carrying out an activity with a novel educational tool, a teacher can attend to, and jump in at appropriate points, when tensions arises thus to orient students to explore the simulated physical phenomena in more productive ways.