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A Step-by-Step Design and Development of an Integrated Educational Software to Deal with Students' Empirical Ideas about Mechanical Interaction

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Abstract

We present the educational software “Interactions between Objects”, which we designed and developed to assist constructive teaching of Newton's 3rd law and Newtonian Dynamics in general. The software was designed on the basis of students' empirical ideas and conceptual difficulties, identified from previous research with Greek students (11–16 years old), the main findings of which are presented. We describe the step-by step design of this software, which aims to help students reconstruct their knowledge in the action–reaction thematic field through a number of experiments, by simulating real everyday life situations of interaction between bodies, modeling those situations by the help of an appropriate didactic method, applying cognitive conflict processes and supporting ‘run my model’ features to promote students' conceptual change in this physics area.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pedagogical Department of Primary Education, University of Thessaly, Greece

    Dimitrios Kolokotronis & Christina Solomonidou

Authors
  1. Dimitrios Kolokotronis
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  2. Christina Solomonidou
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Correspondence to Christina Solomonidou.

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Kolokotronis, D., Solomonidou, C. A Step-by-Step Design and Development of an Integrated Educational Software to Deal with Students' Empirical Ideas about Mechanical Interaction. Education and Information Technologies 8, 229–244 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026308009235

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