Abstract:

There is consensus among science teachers about the need to move the focus from information presentation by the teachers, to facilitating learning by active involvement of the students. Active learning in science means that students develop the ability to question themselves, make plans for a research, take measurements, collect data, come up with a hypothesis, or communicate the results of their work. But active learning needs motivation of the students, and that is something which is not always easy to obtain.

A good method to motivate students is to awaken their curiosity by presenting an experiment or demonstration with an unexpected or surprising result. As soon as we have the students asking: “How did that happen?”, we can take advantage of that positive attitude and direct their curiosity into active learning. These experiments with a surprising outcome are sometimes termed discrepant events and constitute a proven method to motivate students to do inquiry-based science learning.

Indoor free flight is a branch of airplane modelling that deals with very light planes (some of them weight just over three grams) that are flown indoors and have no means of remote control. These light planes fly so slowly that they seem to float in the air, a surprising behavior that could be considered a discrepant event. In this paper, we will describe the characteristics of a good discrepant event, and its role in motivating students for inquiry-based learning. After giving some general examples that illustrate how discrepant events can be used in class, we will explain the design of a science class project that includes building an indoor free flight model.

Keywords:

Inquiry based learning, indoor free flight, science project.