Forces
Secondary foci: Peer Assessment, Boys Attainment, DTaAfL,
How was it used?
The Forces resource is really useful for teaching so many concepts pupils find difficult by using technology in an effective way.
A section which I find particularly effective is the one that aids learners understanding of Terminal Velocity. This section is found between slides 25 and 28 in the green set of slides. Slide 25 is a fantastic series of really clear animations to show the different stages of a parachutist’s fall, but each stage is paused at the beginning to allow the learners to look at the situation and predict what will happen to the forces thanks to the prompting questions on the slides. So, I let the learners play with the animations in groups of two of three on a laptop first and then called their attention to gather some feedback on the board. The pop-up interactive pen built in the resource was very useful to allow the learners to show their responses, but after a bit of discussion on individual slides I would bring up the explanation by clicking on the button on the slide and would ask a few pupils to compare the explanation from their peers with the one on the board and give feedback. This was a useful excercise to encourage Peer Assessment and develop Literacy Skills. On slides 27 and 28 there are two similar activities that are really effective in developing understanding, as well as Literacy Skills. Slide 27 is more suitable to less confident learners and slide 28 is good to challenge more able and talented learners. These are sorting games and in both cases the learners can shuffle each set of cards until the statements match the correct stage of fall. They work quite well with small groups of learners working on the same PC, but I used them as whole class games by printing a screenshot of the game and by cutting both the stages of fall and the statements into individual cards. Then, I gave each card to a learner and they had to find their partner. Slide 28 was really interesting to use in this way. In fact, this slide contains wrong statements and stages that have been included to challenge learners’ misconceptions, but I told my pupils that even if they believed their statement was incorrect, they had to try to find a partner and convince them with as much persuasion as they could (and obviously scientific arguments) that they were their matching card, or they would have ended up without a partner. This worked very well, because it highlighted misconceptions and generate great discussions about the Physic of Terminal Velocity.
Impact and Outcomes
•The stages of fall animations were very useful in developing Literacy Skills and allowed the learners to understand the terminology associated to Terminal Velocity
•AfL and Peer Assessment were a key feature of the activities. Giving learners opportunities to discuss and feedback on each others’ contributions helped many pupils see where their interpretations of events were wrong. Having Peers assessing and giving advice was seen as less intimidating than having the same feedback from their teacher.
•The shuffling cards games helped a number of boys to understand these more abstract concepts more clearly, because the stages of fall and the information they needed was broken down in smaller and more manageable chunks. This allowed most boys to take part in the game and be engaged also by the sense of competition with the other teams.
Learner feedback
“Physics man falling is really easy to understand, because you have time to think and if you get stuck the animation shows what happens to the forces”
“It is nice to learn through a game! More fun than reading lots of notes from a book really!”
Other resources
Scissors, printer, laminator
Lessons Learnt
I had used a similar approach with other physical phenomena that follow a sequence of events, but this one lends itself very well to it. The only thing I found a bit difficult was that if I wanted all the stages and statements from slide 28 I had to make more than one combination and print it, because there are more stages and statements than can fit in the activity. This is because some are deliberately wrong and the children have to spot those.