Experience from the Usage of IT Tools in the Teaching of Science and Mathematics - Some Results from an EU Project

MYLVAGANAM, Saba^{1 & 2}, URCHUEGUIA SCHOLZEL, Javier Fermin³ & TIMMEMBERG, Josef⁴

¹ Faculty of Technology, Hogskolen i Telemark (Telemark College), Kjolnes Ring 56, N-3914 Porsgrunn, NORWAY, sabam@pompel.hit.no, http://www.hit.no/, Faculty of Engineering
² Hogskolen i Bergen (Bergen College), P.O. Box 7030, N-5020 Bergen, Norway, ksm@apostel.hib.no, http://www.hib.no/
³ Departamento de Fisica Aplicada, Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera 14, E-46071 VALENCIA, SPAIN
⁴ Fachhochschule Wilhelmshaven, Postfach 1465, D-26389 Wilhelmshaven, Germany, Timmerberg@fbwi.fh-wilhelmshaven.de

Abstract: In the context of an EU-project, three partner universities performed a series of investigations among teachers of science and mathematics in secondary schools and in the first and second year staff in universities in Germany, Norway and Spain. The basic idea behind the project was to develop course modules dedicated to secondary school teachers and staff in the universities and colleges teaching science and mathematics for students of technology. The keywords in the project were visualisation, interactive learning and usage of IT. The focus was on presenting the subject in an interesting way to the pupils/students so that they develop an intrinsic interest for technology.

This paper presents some of the survey results done among teachers in these countries and gives some illustrative examples.

Keywords: ICT, visualisation, curricula development, mathematics, science, high school, virtual experiments

1  Introduction

Many universities in Europe and Northern America are having great problems in recruiting students for high-tech educations. Some universities have almost quarter of the normal intake capability in certain high-tech oriented curricula. The problem is so drastic in Germany, that the educational authorities have decided to amalgamate faculties of Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences to use the teaching staff en equipment in an economically rational way.

As late as during the latter part of April 1999, CNN carried a news item in their online information, focussing on the declining interest in high-tech studies in the USA, the effects of which are even felt in prestigious Californian universities. A report issued by the American Electronics Association found out that College students are opting away from high-tech degrees. This is happening in a period of tremendous growth in the high-tech sector and when the computer industries are in need of high-tech graduates.

The trend is the same in all the highly industrialised societies: number of students taking up studies for high-tech degrees, including engineering, math, physics and computer science, is declining every year.

The remedy is not in converting the non-willing candidates, who are opting away high-tech studies, but in preparing the students in high schools to develop a taste for high-tech subjects like engineering, math, physics and computer science.

With the same problems in the EU scene, three organisations within what was then called as the Wilhelmshaven Network within the ERASMUS programme, viz. the organisations of the authors of this paper, launched a project with the help of EU's COMENIUS programme. The title of the project was "Integration of IT (Information Technology) in the Teaching of Science and Maths: Awakening interest for Technology in Europe" and the official number allocated by EU for this project was: project number 41011 - CP-97-1-NO-COMENIUS-C31.

In this paper we present some of the results from this project.

2  Status of the project

Table 1 gives the series of activities performed during the project. It is relevant to mention the Internet links for further information, [3], [4], and [5].

The project involved interaction with school students, teachers and suppliers of IT - products relevant to schools. Frequent meetings were held to find out the needs and problems in schools for enhancing the teaching of science and maths subjects. Various software packages available were demonstrated to teachers and school students. A questionnaire was sent to a number of schools. The response was very useful.

To have concrete IT project relevant to schools, a final year student from Bergen was sent to one of our partners in Valencia. She was working on the development of visualisation of the expansion and contraction of gases in various conditions. The results from her work are discussed in the following. Bergen College has been using LabVIEW almost from the inception of the product with close collaboration with National Instruments in Norway. Most of the applications were in the field of sensor data logging and analysis.

Data logging and analysis were pointed out as very relevant issues from science teachers who attended seminars organised by the Bergen College. The decision to develop a LabVIEW based program in the context of a final year project fitted well into the framework of all the partners.

Parallel to the student project on gas law apparatus, questionnaires were sent out to schools with the intention of finding out the status quo of IT in schools. The questionnaire is shown in Table 2. The results from the survey will be now summarised in the following section.

Basically, the teachers in Spain interviewed by Spanish partners, showed interest in courses, particularly due to the general lack of information in Spain on issues of IT as applied to school curricula. Because of the low level of experience of most teachers in the field of IT technologies and its educational aspects, most teachers expressed their preference for courses rather than seminars. It was financially impossible to carry over such courses within the current period of the project.

In Norway, various programs were tried out including visualization packages for Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology. Lectures were given to participants on the use of MATHCAD and MATLAB as well as the use of platform independent executable file developed for the gas law apparatus in a virtual experiment. This virtual experiment is briefly described in this paper and will be demonstrated in the course of the presentation of this paper.

3  Results from the survey

As discussed in [9], there is a lack of know-how among the school students and teachers. Computer illiteracy is a major problem among established teachers. In addition, the schools do not have the economic means to sustain up-to-date computer facilities. In Germany, the study showed that each school had an average allocation for IT around DM 2000 - 3000.

Some of the Physics teachers interviewed had some or other form of familiarity with computer usage particularly for data logging and analysis. There is a lack of systematic updating of equipment and dedicated efforts in helping teachers to learn the necessary IT techniques themselves, before they try to teach the learners at school, viz. the students.

The wishes of enthusiastic and computer-literate teachers are not always possible to realise in schools, without problems. The studies performed by us in various schools indicate that there is a lack of know-how, equipment and financing in almost all the public schools in all the participating countries in this project. Funding and sustaining continuing education of the staff are the bottlenecks in an average school generally in Europe.

The "new-blood" teachers starting their career in schools have not enough computer expertise expected to help the integration of IT in their curricula. According to "Hochschul-informationssystem" (HIS) in Hannover, Germany, among beginners at Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences, only 21% of male students and 6% of female students in Germany, have thorough and extensive knowledge in the use of computers. Although the "Medienkomeptanze" (ability to use media) is viewed as an essential tool, very few students and teachers seem to have enough media knowledge for usage in their day to day activities of learning and teaching, [9].

In Germany, authorities have coined the word "computer-illiteracy" (Computer-Analphabetismus) and the federal state of Bavaria has now initiated a continuing education programme for teachers in "Internet and Multimedia". Tutoring the teachers is the first step in this process. In the opening speech given by the president of Germany, in the internationally known CeBiT exhibition, the focus was on ICT. The minister of education in Germany, Ms. Edelgard Bulmahn emphasises teaching and learning with INTERNET.

Table 1. Activities performed during the course of the project. From [4].

Table 2. Questionnaire sent out to schools (with German and relevant English translations)

4  Gas law apparatus

4.1  What is LabVIEW?

LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a programmers' development environment based on the graphical programming language G. LabVIEW is a general purpose programming system. LabVIEW has libraries of functions and development tools specially meant for data acquisition and instrument control. LabVIEW can easily communicate with known hardware components such as GPIB, VXI, RS-232, RS-485, and plug-in data acquisition boards.

LabVIEW programs are called virtual instruments (VIs) because their appearance and operation can imitate actual instruments. However, VIs are similar to the functions from conventional programming languages.

LabVIEW is in principle a data flow system, consisting of executable nodes, in which nodes execute only on having received all required input data and producing output data automatically at the end of execution at that particular node.

All LabVIEW programmes, or virtual instruments (VIs), have a dual association to a front panel and a block diagram. The front panel is the graphical user interface for the LabVIEW VI. This interface collects input and displays output. The block diagram is the (graphical) source code of the VI.

LabVIEW is based on modular programming. An application is divided into a series of tasks, which again can be divided further. A complicated application becomes a series of subtasks. A VI accomplishes each subtask and the VIs are combined in another block-diagram to accomplish the larger task. Finally, the top-level VI contains a collection of sub VIs that represents the application functions.

4.2  LabVIEW based steering of gas law apparatus

This work was aimed to investigate the possibilities of Virtual Instrumentation (VI's) to enhance student work in laboratories. LabVIEW was chosen as the system to implement such VI. This work was directed towards University students in its first year, [7].

The basic idea behind this part of the project was to develop course modules dedicated to secondary school teachers and staff in the universities and colleges teaching science and mathematics for students of technology. The keywords in the project were visualisation, interactive learning and usage of IT. The focus was on presenting the subject in an interesting way to the pupils/students so that they develop an intrinsic interest for technology.

4.3  Real and Virtual Experiments using LabVIEW

The result of this part of the project is a LabVIEW application that can be used together with the Adiabatic Gas Law Apparatus (model TD-8565 from PASCO scientific) which is regularly used by first Year University students to perform tests on thermodynamics.

The Virtual Instrument developed demonstrates adiabatic and isothermal processes for ideal gases as well as cycles like the Carnot or Otto cycle. In this way:

1. Students have the possibility to measure some physical quantities (in this case temperature, pressure and displacement) and, at the same time, run some physical model, which ideally describes the process observed. The difference between ideal and real processes can thus be visualised.

2. The system is "open" in the sense that changes can easily be introduced in the VI in order to study new processes or to change existing modules.

3. The concept of VI is more Information Technology compatible than existing tools. Data can easily be transferred to or from different applications, transmitted via e-mail, experiments can be shared between different PC's and, not least, the comparatively easy graphic programming can motivate more users to get involved in the definition of the VI itself.

In connection with COMENIUS, this part of the project was designed to exemplify and demonstrate the above concepts on the basis of a real experimental set-up. The technical details on the implementation may be found in [7].

As main conclusions we found that one of the most valuable features of VI's is the ability to acquire data from almost any source, which makes such tools useful for physics laboratory. This can be accomplished which little programming experience in such way that the effort, which usually has to be made in the hardware problem of data acquisition, can be invested in developing the ideas and physical concepts involved in the experiment.

The concept of working in groups with different PC's on the same experiment was also demonstrated, as well as the feasibility of doing changes on the VI in an easy way.

We believe that properly designed VI modules of the type described could bring new perspectives into secondary school laboratories. Though, an effort should be done to make this type of tools more easily accessible to the average Science teacher in schools.

The system is schematically shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Schematic representation of LabVIEW based experimentation with the gas law apparatus. DAQ stands for Digital Acquisition. From [9].

4.4 "Apparatus.vi" for virtual experiments

This application simulates the Adiabatic Gas Law Apparatus, and shows two different thermodynamic processes: adiabatic and isothermal. The apparatus is a cylinder filled with an ideal gas. By choosing the initial values, the final volume and the time for the compression or expansion, the experiment can be started. Pressing "Show Process" button will show the corresponding process. PV- diagram can be selected to see the various cycles.

Figure 2. Front Panel of the VI called apparatus.vi. From [7].

Figure 3. Block diagram (the G code) for the apparatus.vi program. From [7].

5  Conclusions

There is a strong need for improving the IT facilities and know-how in schools. The use of IT to visualize phenomena in science and concepts in mathematics can enhance the teaching and learning profile in a classroom situation. The availability of IT tools can help the students to try them out independently outside the classroom.

The simple LabVIEW experiment developed by Bergen College and Universidad Valencia shows the advantages of having a virtual experiment, which can be used before, during and after a real experiment in the laboratory.

6  Acknowledgement

Our former student Turid Bukkoy of Bergen College developed the LabVIEW based program packages. The funding by the European Union of the project "Integration of IT in the teaching of Science and Maths Project Number : 41011-CP-1-97-1-NO-COMENIUS-C31" is greatly appreciated. Continuous support and constructive criticism from the teachers and students in Germany, Norway and Spain are very much appreciated.

References

[1]  Students are not choosing high-tech educations, study says, (online): http://europe.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/26/cybered.01.ap/

[2]  TIMMEMBERG, J. & MYLVAGANAM, S. Integration of IT in Mathematics and Science. Carlow: Regional Technical College, International Conference in Carlow / Ireland 4 - 5. March 99.

[3]  Project description on line (online) Bergen: http://www.hib.no/filer/comen_3.htm

[4]  Status on completion of project (online) Bergen: http://www.hib.no/filer/stat_com.htm

[6]  Some relevant links for maths and science with visualisations (online) Bergen: http://www.hib.no/filer/comlinks.htm

[7]  BUKKOY, T. Real and Virtual Experiments in Thermo-dynamics: Visualisation in Physics using LabVIEW and an Adiabatic Gas Law Apparatus, Valenicia: 1998

[8]  Classroom Of The Future (COTF), NASDA (online): http://www.cotf.edu/

[9]  MYLVAGANAM, S., URCHUEGIA-SCHOLZEL, J. F. & TIMMEMBERG, J. Use of IT tools in teaching gas laws: LabVIEW-based programs for use with gas law apparatus or as a Virtual Instrument. Sydney: 2^nd Asia Pacific Forum on Engineering and technology Education, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. 4-7 July 1999.