Refinement of remote laboratory for effective physics education: Two cases for pilot study in Mainland Chinese secondary schools

Across different disciplines of science education, physics education is often taking the leading role in the innovative use technology to enhance its teaching and learning, especially for the laboratory practice or experimental work. In this presentation, two master of education students will report their work to make substantial refinement and improvement of our two existing physics experiments, namely (1) electrical circuits and (2) lighting technology. For the former set of experiments, we had employed the proprietary and expensive (>USD10,000) hardware and software from the National Instrument’s LabView to provide students with different choices of light bulbs in either parallel or series connection. For the redevelopment, we will adopt a prize-winning low-cost (<USD100) and easy approach using the open-source microcontroller platform called Arduino and software like Apache and php. For the second set of physics experiments, they had already been developed using the aforementioned low-cost and easy approach but now we want to apply a video-based learning approach in which there is a story with many cartoon videos developed to guide the students or learners on how to conduct the experiments and complete the scientific investigation activities at different stages. A virtual scientist serves as a friendly learning companion or facilitator to provide scaffolding support and encouragement to the students. Those refined experiments have undergone pilot implementation in two secondary schools in Mainland China. Preliminary findings obtained from the questionnaire surveys and interviews of the participating students will be shared in this presentation together with the two postgraduates’ personal reflections. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.