Work-in-Progress: The Potential of Interactive Scripts - Supporting Conceptual Understanding and Collaborative Problem-Solving Skills

Visualization of complex physical phenomena through static diagrams can be a challenge for teachers as well as a frustrating experience for students. This deficiency of static learning material can result in the students having a separated view on diagrams and their related physical quantities, which is counterproductive for the process of proper understanding. In order to address this problem, smart interactive scripts (smartiS) have been developed in an ongoing joined research project. These tools enable students to vary parameters of physical phenomena by themselves and study the impact of their actions, promoting a proactive and self-organized learning process, contrary to receptive learning. This curiosity-based approach is aimed at improving students' motivation by triggering their urge to explore. It turned out that the smartiS are quite popular among students and can be put to good use for problem-based distance learning, which has seen a massive increase in popularity due to the unfortunate circumstances.