New Perspectives in Science Education
To Improve the Students' Learning of Physics through Sports
Miriam Martínez Muñoz, Name of Institution UAH (Spain)
Abstract
The development of new information and communications technologies (ICT) provides schools with new teaching and learning tools.
The integration of new technologies and new teaching methods presents a range of competitive advantages for students, for it allows an improvement of the learning process in each phase of education.
The following article presents a project (ComPhySport) and a website which applies the concepts of Physics to the subject of Physical Education (PE), In them, the students are given the opportunity to observe the direct connection between both subjects on a daily basis.
Physics provides the foundations to understand economic and technological development featuring current society and thus to enrich both formal and personal education. Moreover, Physics allows us to understand scientific work and to bring students closer to scientific methodology so that the students may become enabled to make contributions using their own criteria when approaching important current affairs such as energy, climate change, recycling and so forth.
Over the last few years, it has been shown that students present difficulties in assimilating basic Physics concepts due to the fact that, in most cases, such concepts are limited to theoretical explanations in the classroom and their application to daily life has remained so far occasional. To this it must be added the use of scientific language and mathematic complexity, which promotes a perception of Physics as a complex discipline detached from reality leading to lack of motivation for its study [4]. On such grounds, more and more teachers have searched for new tools that may be used in the classroom to motivate students by helping them to assimilate basic Physics concepts.
In sharp contrast to Physics, Physical Education , is an appealing subject for students for it mainly takes place outside the classroom and students, regardless their sporting skills, can adquire curricular main competences in different ways .
The main objective of this project is to improve the students' learning of Physics through sports.
