Abstract:

In a demanding era of rapid energy transition towards renewable energy sources and electric mobility, there is an increasing need for mechanical and electrical engineers, physicists, IT specialists, as well as for informed customers, who have to make their qualified buying and voting decisions based on proved facts, rather than beliefs. Primary education has always played a key role in motivating young people for their future career and besides learning to read, write and some basic calculus, in achieving what we usually call basic polytechnic literacy – a set of skills, experiences and knowledge, that forms children’s view on natural phenomena and the understanding of the more and more technological world.

The following paper does focus at the role of electrical construction sets for the age of 8 to approximately 11 years in the learning process, corresponding to class 2 to 5 of the elementary school in Czech Republic. There are many mechanical and electrical construction sets on the market, some of them more capable than other, but only a few of them truly deserve the adjective scientific. We have put together a basic polytechnic curriculum for pupils in the age of 8 to 11 and tried to build these simple exploratory experiments with typical examples of children’s electrical construction sets. Every experiment is accompanied by our standardized worksheet with basic instructions, helping schemes, structured heuristic exercises and further leading questions. Pupils have to explore the electrical and electro-mechanical phenomena by themselves in a playful way. The paper sums up the results of participative observations and interviews. After the evaluation we suggest and discuss possible improvements to the electrical construction sets as well as to our worksheets.

Keywords:

Electrical construction set, experiment, low voltage circuit, primary education, STEM, polytechnic literacy, curriculum, Czech Republic.