Abstract:

Higher education academic activities involve a wide range of multimedia-based methodologies nowadays, as a result of the rapid progress in this field. Moreover, the ongoing Bologna process comes along with a challenging stress on the diversity of learning and assessment tasks. Thus, multimedia-supported seminars, computer simulations, or web activities, such as wikis or forums, have become very popular as student assignments.
Also, in introductory Physics, information technology related activities have spread throughout academic curricula. However, the task immediacy, the excess of visual information or the lack of detailed feedback, appear as disadvantages for these methodologies.
On the other hand, problem solving reveals as essential for developing qualitative reasoning, relating weakly linked knowledge, and training the skills of autonomous learning and critical thinking.
As a Physics education research project, we have applied multimedia-based methodologies together with traditional problem solving practice in an introductory Physics course. As our students, in the first year of an engineering degree, present a certain lack of preparation in basic subjects, namely, Physics and Mathematics, we also have considered the effects of this educational issue in the performance of the proposed activities. In this communication, we report the student response towards the multimedia-based methodologies and contrast the results of both sorts of tasks.
A judicious use of new media combined with a revised problem solving methodology seems to help the main goals of an introductory Physics course.

Keywords:

physics education, problem solving, multimedia-based technologies.