Experimentação e simulação computacional no ensino de estados físicos da matéria e transições de fase na educação básica

Abstract

This study aimed to develop and implement a set of activities aimed at primary school students to enable learning about states of matter and phase transitions with emphasis on microscopic interpretation of phenomena. The proposed activities include experiments in the teaching laboratory and computer simulations. The proposal uses techniques of active learning and its theoretical basis is the Ausubel meaningful learning and Connectivism Theory. For the exploitation of macroscopic aspects involved in phase transition of water, it was proposed an open experimental activity in which the students participated in the design and implementation of a experiment for determination the heating curve of water. The activities with computer simulation used simulators adapted from Molecular Workbench project, emphasizing the microscopic interpretation of the states of matter and phase transitions, with special emphasis the dynamic aspect of microscopic systems. The activities have been developed in a particular school in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul and involved a total of 35 students from first year of high school divided into two classes (control and experimental), for a total of 12 hours of activities. In both classes the teacher presented the problematized theoretical concepts and applied the experimental activity to determine the heating curve of water. In the experimental class, in addition to the activities applied to the class control was applied to the activity of exploitation of computer simulators. The qualitative and quantitative research involved assessment tools such as knowledge test and guides for experimental and computer simulation activities. The students' motivation was evaluated before and after the application of the educational proposal using a previously validated questionnaire obtained from the literature. The results obtained through the analysis of knowledge tests show that students of the experimental group showed a statistically significant improvement in the performance, which did not occur with the students of the control group. The analysis of the student answers to the simulation guides activity suggests that most of the students correctly identified the microscopic behavior of solids, liquids and gases, as well as properly interpreted the dynamic process of phase transition. These results suggest that the simulators played an important role in learning the microscopic aspects of the phenomena studied. The results of motivation to learn tests showed that student motivation is close to the average value of the scale used, and there were no statistically significant differences in motivation between the two groups, as well as before and after the implementation of the educational proposal. It follows that the use of computer simulations, together with open experimental activities facilitates the learning of concepts associated with the states of matter and phase transitions, particularly the interpretation of the microscopic behavior of systems.