Pilot Study Prague
H. Mann 2.11.2008
Context
The POPBL idea in the Czech Republic
POPBL is a well excepted educational approach in the Czech Republic. For example, the Czech
education reformer Comenius wrote the book „Learning by Play” in 1630 already
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comenius). During the Communist period the importance of
science education and vocational training for high school students – both boys and girls – was
stressed. High schools usually organized excursions to the industry or other enterprises.
Currently, the Ministry of Education stopped defining curricula for teacher, but students’
competences which their students are supposed to achieve. This should give even more space for
exploiting POPBL at Czech schools.
The pilot project objective
Verifying POPBL benefits would mean just ‘bringing wood into the forest’ in the Czech
Republic as explained above. We have set out more ambitious targets for ourselves in compliance
with the project goal of attracting more high-school students to science or engineering study and
to prepare them better for entering labor market.
Our target was threefold:
1. The time has come when the high-school students should learn about computer-assisted
modeling, analysis and simulation that have become standard tools in many professions,
especially in exact sciences and engineering. Simulation should become a part of the highschool student computer literacy.
2. The most suitable subject for demonstrating principles and benefits of simulation is the
course in physics. As the high-school students are not familiar with solving differential
equations the courses involve mainly memorizing precepts and formulas. Simulation would
allow students not only to talk about, but to truly investigate dynamics of even rather real-life
systems.
3. Courses in physics form a core prerequisite for university study in all exact sciences and
engineering. Yet these courses are often regarded by students as a difficult requirement and
an uninteresting academic hurdle. Simulation might change this students’ attitude and raise
their interest in the subject.
The school attitude
I was grateful for ‘recruiting’ students for the project, for attending the project sessions, and for
taking care about student team diaries to Prof. Vesela. As none of the teachers of physics in the
school was acquainted with computer-assisted modeling and simulation I had to take the
teacher’s role over by myself though I have had no previous experience in teaching high-school
students.
Features
Number of experimental groups, number of pupils, boys and girls
4 experimental group, 17 pupils, 15 boys and 2 girls.
Number of control groups, number of pupils, boys and girls
Though the available data were far from sufficient for any statistically significant investigation
Dr Hamhalterova asked a university student of pedagogy for providing some interviews with
gymnasium students.
Number of teachers
1 teacher (Mann), 1 organiser (Vesela). Two lectures accompanied by videos were given to
students by engineers from the Aero Company.
Level, age of pupils
1st to 3rd year of gymnasium, age 16-18.
Subject; curriculum topic
Physics enhanced by computer-assisted modelling and simulation.
Besides one group formed by 1st year students, the other student groups passed traditional courses
in physics except that on electricity. None of the students was familiar with the existence of
computer-assisted modelling or simulation.
Amount of class hours, of home hours
The work in the project lasted from the middle of September 2007 till the end of January 2008.
Besides two-hour sessions per week, some students used to come for consultations outside these
hours. Such a large number of hours was necessary as
 different group of students from those participating in the pre-test was chosen the school
(so that the introduction of students to the topic had to start once more from the very
beginning)
 the school could not find a more compact period of time for the projects
 the projects were not considered as a part of a course included in the school time-table
The assumed number of home hours was two per week. It appeared, however, that only some of
the students were able to fulfil this assumption.
2
Resources
Students worked in the computer class-room of the Computing and Information centre in the
Czech Technical University. As all the students had a computer connected to the Internet at
home, and the software they used for the project implementation was accessible across the
Internet, they could work also from their homes.
Process
Pre-test
There were four successive half-day sessions available for the pre-test. Thirteen participating
tudents ware asked to implement eight modelling and simulation experiments and to compare
their results with the related formulas given in their textbooks. As the time allocated to the pretest was so compact, the students‘ progres very fast and successful.
Problems
The chosen project topics were not only of the analysis nature like those in the pre-test, but there
was a simple engineering design problem included in each of them. The idea behind project
topics was to give students opportunity to grasp the role of simulation in solving real-life
problems. For this reason, a simple design task was assigned to them in each of the projects.
Project title
ejection pilot
seat
airplane landing
gear
hoisting machine
binary adder
Modeled physical phenomena
planar body motion
propulsion motor drag, acceleration
air resistance of seat and parachute
dynamics of simple mechanism
fluid/mechanical energy conversion
accumulation of fluid energy
rotary/translatory energy conversion
electro/mechanical energy
conversion compliance of hoist rope
principle of digital computers,
logical functions, electrical switches
Design problem
design of seat trajectory
respecting pilot overload and
variability of their weight
replacing a heavy pump by a
leihter one combined with a
fluid accumulator
using automatic control to
achieve recquired velocity
profile of vessel landing
replacement of logical gates
by electrical relays
Planning
Students were asked to form their groups by themeselves using the matrix approach (as described
earlier during the POPBL project) with the following specializations of the team members:
3
Member
documentation
specialist
Task
System function
To draw and describe the system configuration and function
simulation
manager
System simulation
To specify which system behavior or critical state to be simulated
modeling
specialist
System modeling
To design, set up, and debug the required system model
software
specialist
System animation
To visualize the system behavior using data resulting from simulation
A special website was established for the projects with the aim to facilitate students‘ mutual
communication, as well as documenting and disseminating their results.
To support students during the pilot-project implementation a special website has been
established at http://virtual.cvut.cz/popbl/ containing
 tools facilitating students‘ mutual communication
 software for regular uploading students‘ log books
 downloadable texts with a basic survey of modeling
 English-Czech dictionary of physics terms
 online English-to-Czech translational tool
 software for animation of simulation results
 collection of simulation experiments in physics
 disseminating students‘ results
Development
At the start of the projects, students were asked to answer questions about their experience and
interests. At the same time, they were asked to fill-in anonymous questionnaires about their
expectations in relation to the projects. Students filled in another detailed anonymous
questionnaires at the end of the project expressing their opinions.
Questions to be answered
Survey of answers
What item has been the most
interesting one for you in the
project?
interesting topics, team collaboration, graphical way of modeling
and simulation, the topic, interrelation between physical theory and
practice, different way of working, excursion to the industry,
cooperation with the technical university, lectures given by other
people than teachers, simple usage of DYNAST
What you did not like in the
project?
difficulties to understand what is it about at the beginning, our bad
planning of our work, it took too much time from the start to the end
4
What you missed in the
sessions on modeling?
more time for modeling and submodels, more simulations,
instructions on animation, more fun
What would you recommend
for the similar future projects?
more time for instruction on DYNAST usage, to cancel the position
of the team member responsible for documenting, an example of
presentation
In which way DYNAST should
be improved?
its animation tool should be easier to use, the DYNAST Help should
be in Czech
What you learned during the
project implementation?
team collaboration, work with a deadline, engineering systems and
technologies, better presentation, using simulation software, to think
in a quantitative way, new areas in physics, using DYNAST
Results
All tasks assigned to each of the group were fulfilled and the expected results have been
achieved.
Therefore, the main objective of our POPBL project – to test the hypothesis that high-school
students are capable to use simulation in physics and to profit from it – has been aproved.
Transfer of knowledge
It appeared during the project documenting and final presentation preparation that the students
are purely trained for these activities.
The final presentations took place in front of a large student audience in the Arabska
Gymnasium. They delivered the presentation in English. Though I supported the idea, I realized
later that this was not a good decision. Only when I asked students to repeat their presentation in
Czech, they got an appreciable response from the audience and many questions were raised.
Evaluation of the pupils
No quantitative evaluation was applied to students involved in the projects as this activity was
not included into their study plan.
Assessment
The student answers indicate convincingly enough that the pilot project objective – proving that
high-school students are capable of using computer-assisted simulation and exploiting it to
enhance courses in physics – has been met. Despite the impediments like that
 concurrent consulting of four rather ambitious projects by a single tutor without any
previous experience of teaching high-school students
 tutor-to-students contact restricted to two-hour sessions with week-long gaps
 inability of some of the students to attend each project session
5
Students highly appreciated contacts with the Aero Company and the chance to work at the
university environment.
Recommendations
Characteristics of a student project
A discussion of POPBL projects should start with the specification differentiating the project
from the other similar educational activities:

a project has one only clearly defined objective motivating students to learning

the project topic should be related to real life and attractive to students

the project should take place in an exactly specified period of time

the project should be continuously evaluated during its whole period

students should keep their own records of the project development

the project creates opportunities forcing students to employ their own initiative

students themselves present the project in front of an audience

the teacher acts in the project as a guide, consultant, intermediary, critic and fan
Teachers’ attitude
Experience from numerous schools in different countries indicates that it is usually easier to teach
simulation students than teachers. Many teachers tend to be conservative, and do not like to
deviate from what they learned themselves during their own study. As far as modeling is
concerned, teachers’ adaptation to the graphical approach is just a matter of their good will to get
familiar with it.
The skill necessary for handling simulation software is another matter, however. Here the
teachers are disadvantaged with respect to students by their age. It takes teachers usually
somewhat more time to harness new software. Fortunately, this handicap is not of much impact
in the course, as students usually seek and get help in handling software from their peers without
even informing teachers.
Students’ attitude
As most of the students welcome any opportunity to play with computers inducing these in
physics education enhances their interest in the subject. Teachers, however, must be aware of
some negative attitudes of students using computers.
Students tend to take everything the computer prints out for granted. They are very impatient
when handling computers and often press a keyboard key or click the mouse before thinking
much about its impact. They show a common tendency to simulate even complex systems before
attaining the necessary qualification in debugging the system models step by step. After such
negative experience they can get easily discouraged from simulation.
6
Courses in physics
The traditional approach to teaching these courses is theory driven:
a) students are first introduced to theory
b) then they are shown experiments demonstrating the theory
The recommended approach is experiment driven:
a) each new phenomenon is first investigated by students using experiments, either real
experiments, or more often simulation or virtual experiments that are available to students
on the Internet any time in any place
b) the corresponding portion of theory is introduced to students after they are sufficiently
motivated to it
Such a learning approach inverts in fact the traditional approach.
The experiments should interlace the learning process. Complementing the experiments by
POPBL projects related to the course topics would be very useful, of course.
Learning modes in physics-oriented POPBL
Learning
objective
Assignment
Given
Task
stirring up interest in animated model of to modify system parameters and system excitation to
physics
a real system
observe changes in the system behavior
introduction to modeling in physics
configuration of a
real system
to set up the corresponding system model and to simulate
its behavior
more advanced way configuration of a
of modeling
real system
to set up the system model from custom-made submodels
and to simulate its behavior
introduction to
control
plant specification to reduce the model, to propose its control, to verify it
& control objective using the plant unreduced model, and to test it
introduction to
system design
system
specification
to design system configuration and to optimize its
parameters by a trial-and-error procedure
design of virtual
experiments
experiment
specification
to draw animated geometric as well as the corresponding
dynamic models, and to write the simulation script
Next steps
Dissemination plan for the POPBL project in the Czech Republic
7

Paper in the European Journal on Engineering Education together with Prof. Weiler about
our experiences gained during the project

Organization of regular seminars and an e-mail discussion group to form a community of
teachers of physics and other exact-science oriented courses interested in the topic to
spread the idea and to seek feedback

One-year blended course for high-school teachers accredited by the Czech Ministry of
Education the graduates of which will be awarded by a diploma

Recommendation for a re-arrangement of high-school physics curricula to adapt it to
POPBL exploiting computer-assisted simulation

Preparation of a textbook rudiment and a collection of examples implementing the
recommendations
Students working on the project in the computer class-room
8
Students visiting
the Aero Company in Prague
as a part of their projects
9