Relevant initiatives

GEI - Games, Experiments, Ideas

Unità di Ricerca in Didattica della Fisica dell'Università di Udine

1994

National

No

Teaching Methodology, Didactical resource

Physics

Italian, English

Teachers, Students

Today GEI is a collection of 120 simple experiments in mechanics, heat and temperature, electricity, electro-magnetism, optics, chemistry and astronomy. The equipment goes from cheap and easily reproducible materials to new technologies such as on-line sensors and computers.
GEI aims to be a source of activities to try, to play with, to experiment with... exploring ideas and using ideas to explore phenomena. It is not something to only look at - it is intended as a tool to be used, in school or in a more open environment, for analysing and understanding phenomena. It can be enjoyed in a number of ways: pupils can work with their teachers, alone or in groups, with schoolmates or friends, with university researchers or parents.
GEI addresses teachers who wish to enrich their science teaching with practical activities. The familiar materials are unthreatening to any user. They encourage the user to make personal explorations, to perform simple experiments and to answer the questions posed by the accompanying cards. The exhibit stresses the playful aspect of individual discovery, so important in eliciting the personal involvement necessary when learning scientific subjects especially at the age when developing scientific culture requires the maximum effort, i.e. when children are forming their basic knowledge. The experiments allow to acquire fundamental scientific knowledge and can be organised as monothematic educational mini-courses. Without any presumption of completeness, they indicate the correct way of posing questions to oneself and of using ones knowledge and ability to obtain appropriate answers through appropriate experiments.
Four kinds of written materials are available for each experiment: a) photographs of the experiments with captions, b) short and easy-to-read cards suggesting a first operational approach to each experiment, c) cards offering guidance to a thoughtful performance of the activities, d) articulated texts for a more formal school-based approach, containing tools for investigating the children's learning patterns.
Several didactical paths through the materials have already been opened. Other paths will be opened with time by the children and by their teachers.

The idea that gives life to the site is extremely simple and linear: to propose with images and to accompany with descriptions 120 experiments easily consistent in the physic lab in schools.
Scrolling down the homepage, there are some different sections, from them it is possible to access to the experiments like the following concerning forces on the inclined plane. http://www.fisica.uniud.it/GEI/i/a6.html
The availability of the translation’s website (English and Italian) will help the students to fraternize with the international scientific language.
Unfortunately, at the moment, a lot of work in progress can be pointed out through research sheets of the experiments (“questionario”, “informazioni”, “istruzioni” [“questionnaire, informations, instructions”]. As soon as these experiments will be available, they will increase the didactic range of the initiative.

The website is dedicated exclusively to physics. It collects 120 simple physics experiments divided into thematic groups. Each experiment is presented through photographs and short written descriptions.
Links to the questionnaire, information and instructions are not active.
The website is easy to be surfed. However the various experiences are to be developed yet.
The web site can be useful in elementary schools or in lower second-ary schools for the introduction to some physical phenomena.

The website is useful because it show experiments that teach physics and other scientific subject principles.
With the future chance to fill in the questionnaire to verify the understanding, it will satisfy the user's need.