Imagine being locked in a chemical lab with 4 "bombs" that will detonate within 60 min unless you neutralize them. You now must use your brain, chemical knowledge, intuition, and need a bit of luck to neutralize the bombs and escape unharmed... This is the concept behind "chemical escape", an activity for high-school students, which brings the extremely popular genre of "escape rooms" into the chemistry classroom; it engages students in learning, increases motivation, and bridges the gap between classroom chemistry and the real world, as well as allows for teamwork and peer learning. A mobile escape room was designed and built in Israel; it consisted of lab-based activities and was suitable for high schools. To date, the activity has been introduced to more than 350 chemistry teachers who then implemented it to over 1500 students. An evaluation questionnaire was developed on the basis of students' statements of their experience of the escape room (bottom-up); the results indicate that the students were highly engaged and motivated during the activity, and there was an appreciation for teachers' efforts to run the escape room, an increased feeling of efficacy, and effective teamwork. In this paper we provide a detailed description of all the puzzles and an explanation of how to operate it in a school lab.
Educational research and policy suggest inquiry as one of the most prominent ways of promoting effective science education. However, traditional approaches towards inquiry learning are not always sufficiently motivating for all learners. The EU-funded project, TEMI – Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated, suggests that mysterious scientific phenomena introduced via drama-based pedagogies and showmanship skills could have the potential to engage more students emotionally in science and to entice them to solve the mysteries through inquiry. This paper reports teachers’ views on using storytelling in connection with mysteries in the science classroom. The data stem from a case of chemistry teachers’ continuous professional development within the TEMI project in Israel. Data were collected from 14 teachers by means of a questionnaire, interviews, observations, and written reflection essays. The case discusses teachers’ views on the benefits and difficulties of using story-based science inquiry activities.
We propose and evaluate a framework supporting collaborative discovery learning of complex systems. The framework blends five design principles: (1) individual action: amidst (2) social interactions; challenged with (3) multiple tasks; set in a (4) a constrained interactive learning environment that draws attention to (5) highlighted target relations. The framework addresses a persistent tension in discovery-based pedagogy between offering students the freedom to initiate, experiment, and explore and offering them tailored experiences with many instances of particular relations underlying the target conceptual structure. The framework was realized with TrafficJams, a participatory simulation in which students drive together. A class of high-school students worked with TrafficJams over 2.5 hours. The teacher's role was to orchestrate the activity but there was no explicit instruction of the traffic and complexity principles. The students' activities were observed and logged and they completed pre-and post-test questionnaires. In terms of driving in the simulation, the students learned to drive in ways that reduced congestion in traffic by decreasing lane and speed changes, and keeping their speed down. Even though there was no explicit teaching, half of the students learned that car speed distribution alone can generate traffic jams with no additional causes; and, keeping a safe following distance from the next driver increases everyone's speed. Our study suggests that the learning environment partially met both the overarching design goal of constrained discovery and the specific content goal of systems reasoning.
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