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The effects of physical and virtual manipulatives on learning basic concepts in electronics

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this study we investigated the effects of using physical manipulatives (PM) and virtual manipulatives (VM) on students' understanding of electronics. In our experiment, all participants completed two similar tasks, one with a tangible toolkit and another with a computer simulation. Both systems shared the same functionalities. Half of the participants first worked with a physical manipulative and then virtual simulation, while the rest did the opposite sequence. Our findings suggest that working with physical manipulatives might improve significantly learning gains compared to a computer simulation. Additionally, users who first worked with the physical manipulatives and then the virtual environment scored higher on the final post-test compared to participants who completed the same activities in the reverse order. This difference, however, did not reach statistical significance.

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References

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Chan, J., Pondicherry, T., & Blikstein, P. (2013). LightUp: an augmented, learning platform for electronics. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 491--494). ACM.
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Eylon, B. S., & Ganiel, U. (1990). Macro-micro relationships: the missing link between electrostatics and electrodynamics in students' reasoning.International Journal of Science Education, 12(1), 79--94.
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Horn, M. S., Solovey, E. T., Crouser, R. J., & Jacob, R. J. (2009, April). Comparing the use of tangible and graphical programming languages for informal science education. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 975--984). ACM.
[4]
Marshall, P., Cheng, P. C. H., & Luckin, R. (2010). Tangibles in the balance: a discovery learning task with physical or graphical materials. InProceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (pp. 153--160). ACM.
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NASA TLX: Task Load Index. http://humansystems.arc.nasa.gov/groups/TLX/
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Perkins, K., Adams, W., Dubson, M., Finkelstein, N., Reid, S., Wieman, C., & LeMaster, R. (2006). PhET: Interactive simulations for teaching and learning physics. The Physics Teacher, 44, 18.
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Sengupta, P., & Wilensky, U. (2009). Learning electricity with NIELS: Thinking with electrons and thinking in levels. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, 14(1), 21--50.
[8]
Zuckerman, O., Arida, S., & Resnick, M. (2005). Extending tangible interfaces for education: digital montessori-inspired manipulatives. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 859--868). ACM.

Cited By

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  • (2022)The Best of Two Worlds: A Systematic Review on Combining Real and Virtual Experiments in Science EducationReview of Educational Research10.3102/0034654322107941792:6(911-952)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2022

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '14: CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2014
    2620 pages
    ISBN:9781450324748
    DOI:10.1145/2559206
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 April 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. experimentation

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    CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2014
    Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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    CHI EA '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 1,000 of 3,200 submissions, 31%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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    • (2022)The Best of Two Worlds: A Systematic Review on Combining Real and Virtual Experiments in Science EducationReview of Educational Research10.3102/0034654322107941792:6(911-952)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2022

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