Abstract:

In recent years, we can observe changes in students' initial knowledge in the first year of study in physics fields, but also in general and technically oriented ones. The majority of these changes result from the transformation of the goals of science education in secondary schools. A reduction in the number of physics classes was implemented here, which was compensated for in pre-graduate and graduate years by a relatively large number of elective courses. The risk, however, is that this form of democratization of study offers responsible students and schools great freedom in the last two years of study but also gives them great responsibility. It is leading to a situation where students with a significantly lower physics background than those who started their studies a few years ago are applying to study technical fields at universities. The teaching of science subjects is moving more towards developing general competencies, and this trend usually needs to be sufficiently supported by a high-quality selection of physical content. Several universities are, therefore, gradually lowering their requirements - reducing the physics content in introductory courses, changing compulsory courses to elective ones, and some technical/science programs have even dropped physics altogether. In fields of study where the reduction would be difficult or not make sense, we have to look for another answer. The author's team tried to solve such a dilemma two years ago when we designed and implemented an introductory physics course for zero-year students at a science-oriented university. In this paper, we describe the construction of a brain-friendly course for the learner, relying on the theory of the Five Pillars of the Mind - identifying relevant symbols, patterns, order, categories, and relations in the educational content. Our course focuses on building a solid set of key concepts integrated into meaningful contexts. Less emphasis is placed on the acquired volume of knowledge. In the paper, we will also describe the progressive method of productive failure (PF), in which students try to solve a complex physics problem and fail to find a satisfactory solution, which, however, prepares them for the further well-grounded acquisition of knowledge. Our contribution partly refers to the earlier published works of the author's collective, in which we analyzed the discussed introductory physics course in a specific aspect of a virtual laboratory exercise. In the end, we looked back at our original expectations and supposed outputs, which we confronted with the experience gained after several semesters of the introductory course implementation. We will also outline the perspectives of further development of the described teaching method.

Keywords:

Physics course, college education, physics curriculum, concepts, context.