Abstract:

The teaching of Physics and Mathematics in high school is associated with high levels of failure, dropout of students and a lack of the necessary infrastructure to promote student-centred learning. This situation motivated the authors of this work and a group of 20 teachers with experience in the teaching of Physics and Mathematics to develop at the Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (ICAT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a methodology and an online technological platform called Microexperimentation to face the problems mentioned above through the development of experimental activities online. We developed mixed and face-to-face educational environments with audiovisual materials from laboratory experiments with the possibility of interacting with them at the teacher's or student's will.
Microexperimentation reduces the experimental execution time by the students and focuses on the careful realization and recording of measurements. It is technologically supported in an online platform that has a virtual modelling and measurement laboratory so that the student can control the reproduction and observation of the contents and develop various processes of measurement, data capture and analysis, graphing, modelling and reporting of the activity, in an integral tool developed with free software resources, for student-centred, collaborative, self-managed and ubiquitous learning.
It has an interface to control the reproduction, speed, progress and size of the multimedia resources, as well as the measurement of physical variables included in the didactic material; and, with videos of detonating phenomena of student interest and formal experiments with various laboratory equipment. It has elements to capture, store and graph data, mathematical modelling of what is observed in the data, an activity questionnaire and a work log so that all the activity is "self-contained" and the user can carry out practically everything necessary for the development of concepts, methods, skills and techniques for learning physics and mathematics at any time and place, allowing the repetition of multiple experiences.
The work methodology of the microexperiments consists of the fact that the multimedia material can be observed and executed at the will of the participants, with activities focused on the conceptual development of various topics, the discussion of phenomena, experiments, procedures, techniques and practical skills related to the physics and mathematics; for the analysis, discussion and reporting of systematized practical activities under the Blended Learning modality, which combines face-to-face and virtual learning.
At the same time, a 160-hour teacher training course was carried out from May to November 2022 to familiarize UNAM high school teachers with this methodology and platform. In this course, interdisciplinary and collective work among physics and mathematics teachers was promoted. The interactivity between teacher and student was carried out synchronously to asynchronously through developing projects and problems, videoconferences and forums. Teaching-Learning Sequences that benefited nearly 5,000 UNAM high school students were designed and applied.

Keywords:

Micro-experimentation, Blended Learning, Physics and Mathematics Instruction, Technological platforms of education.