Who Needs Tutorials When You've Got Phunland!

When I was doing my homework this weekend, my 15-year old daughter looked over my shoulder. She first asked me what I was doing and then almost immediately gutturally moaned the word “physics” when she noticed the “2D physics sandbox” descriptor under the “phun” logo. Even though she won’t experience physics until next year, the course reputation has already been clearly communicated to Kelsey by her three older siblings. It’s also interesting to note that this groan came from an honors student who plans on pursuing a biology or chemistry undergraduate major when she enters college in 2011. But…as she watched me work within the application for a few minutes, Kelsey asked me if she could try the program and I promptly relinquished my seat to observe her.

I found it interesting that she quickly disregarded the program’s tutorial – like father, like daughter. I too, found the tutorial to be non-intuitive and frustrating. It seemed that I should be able to apply the tutorial directions directly into the program by following sequential instructions – which would have been awesome – but I could not achieve this kind of functionality. Fortunately, the Phunland program itself is so interesting and elegantly simple, that even people not intrinsically “wired” for physics like Kelsey and me felt compelled to just experiment with the program, learning through trial and error, which, I would argue is the ultimate goal of any science course or program. Through trial and error (and a little bit of back and forth with the tutorial for basic command guidance) with simple geometric shapes, springs and water, I spent an inordinate amount of time adjusting the friction and density of my moving objects in an effort to try and control the gravitational movement of my objects. As I navigated through the program I concluded that this is a wonderful constructivist teaching tool that quickly establishes baseline accurate or inaccurate understandings and through experimentation constructs new meaning for learners. I’m assuming that Phunland is the program you refer to as “aimed at high [intrinsic] motivation” given a learner’s natural tendency to want to play with the program, and Concord’s “molecular Work Bench” as the application focused on “deeper content.” If so, I’m not sure I agree with this general statement because I think that Phunland, used to enhance the instruction of a gifted physics teacher, could truly help make physics relevant and meaningful to even the most resistant and intimidated science students, helping to achieve a much deeper level of content understanding.

The Concord Molecular Work Bench program utilized sequenced instruction to step through a lesson focused on random motion and molecular stickiness. In fact, I would say that the instructional design of the lesson really negated the need for the typical “how to use the program” tutorial and replaced it with linearally sequenced content with instructions that simply moved the learner through a lesson with very, very specific learning objectives. While the program clearly transferred the ideas of “stickiness” variables of positive and negative charges as well as the effects of temperature on self-assembly, for me there was no depth of understanding transferred. So even though the sequential instructions made the application easy to use and navigate this “strength” was also the program’s weakness in that experimentation beyond the well-defined lesson parameters was not possible. Even though I am often a fan of the Corcord Consortium methodology, because manipulating animations teaches complex content infinitely better than any textbook can, I’d have to say that I preferred Phunland’s more free wheeling blank canvas approach when comparing the two for this assignment. I think that both programs could be powerful adjunctive tools in the hands of a good teacher depending upon the specific learning objectives that need to be achieved.