Abstract:

Nowadays, both in primary and secondary levels, active methodologies have a prominent role. Students are the owners of the learning process, while teachers offer situations that allows them to develop their skills. It is clear, then, that there is a lack of coordination between school and university. So when students get to university their motivation for attending classes is really low. In this work, a field survey on the study method of a current university student in a course of physics is discussed. The current student has evolved as quickly as the information and communication technologies (ICTs). In particular, he gets all the subject matter of a course by means of only one mouse click from certain websites. Former students have uploaded all kinds of documents in these webs including the class notes. Therefore, they do not require to go to the class. The master class as a means to get the subject matter is not a challenge, but, rather, a boredom. The lack of study makes the student lose the thread of the explanation after only a few minutes of the beginning of a class. Furthermore, the student in the first years is not yet mature to accomplish a self-learning: he clashes with the complexity of the subject and, sometimes, with the own defects of training. This fact causes him to attend remedial classes of very short duration and focused on passing the course. The meaningful and constructive learning of the subject matter lose its meaning. Thus, the absenteeism in the university courses has skyrocketed. In short, it is necessary to incorporate new strategies to the master class that help the teacher in its work, and provide an added value to his classes. In this sense, we show two different actions. On the one hand, we postulate to incentivize the interaction in class between teacher and student. This interaction can be based on posing problems to the student to solve outside the classroom. These problems will be collected, corrected and assessed, later and will allow the teacher to accomplish a continuous monitoring of the student. This work must be the most individualized as possible to avoid originality problems, and that certain students do not deceive themselves by resorting to copy from each other. This continued monitoring avoids to a large extent that the student stops studying the subject and represents for him a stimulus almost daily to improve its competencies. On the other hand, we also positively value the incorporation of gamification strategies. The skill of the students when managing the electronic games is one of the main competencies evidenced by the current student. In our case, we introduce game elements in the form of interactive simulations on physics problems developed in class. In these simulations, student can play with a set of parameters to discover the dynamics effects produced on the system. They are made from the freeware programme “Easy Java Simulations”. These simulations can be displayed as web pages in tablets or smartphones. These activities complement the traditional teaching in class, since the teacher engages the students’ attention and these becomes active participants of their learning.

Keywords:

Absenteeism, interaction, simulations, gamification.