Abstract:

The fast development of computer based tools has triggered the design of powerful virtual laboratories in the scientific disciplines that compete with the real ones in the improvement of the acquisition of basic concepts by the students, as well as their manipulative abilities. In the case of the discipline of physics, one of such techniques, namely video analysis, has revealed itself as a very effective tool in the characterization and analysis of phenomena related to motion. This is mainly due to its capacity to “digitize” and thus “apprehend” the real world. The “capture” of physical phenomena allows us to easily use powerful digital tools for its analysis. In this way, video analysis appears as a tool with high didactical capacity, affordable and able to obtain high accuracy in the measurements.

Nevertheless, the effective introduction of this tool in the physics undergraduate laboratory must be accompanied by important methodological changes in the presentation and analysis of the phenomena to the students. We have described and justified these changes in previous works.

The objective of the present work is to validate this tool by comparing it with conventional tools and methodologies. Then we have performed an experiment with 126 students that followed the module of first year physics belonging to three different careers in two faculties of the Universitat Politècnica de València.

All the students were exposed to the same concepts in mechanics with two different methodologies. Half the students (control group) developed mechanics experiments using conventional tools of the physics laboratory whereas the other half (experimental group) used video analysis as basic measurement tool and an alternative methodology explained in seminar sessions. All the students took a test of basic mechanics concepts that has been widely accepted and validated in the literature. In order to establish the initial level and the improvement obtained, the test was repeated at the beginning and the end of the activities. In this way we got the initial knowledge level and the improvement index. The results indicate that the experimental group behaves better than the control group.