COMPUTER-SIMULATION AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPING INTUITIVE AND CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING IN MECHANICS

This study focuses on the intuitive and conceptual understanding that engineering students develop of the central phenomena in their studies, and of the problem situations in which those phenomena appear, when computer microworlds and simulations have been at the core of their learning experience. Intititive understanding refers to the immediate sense that a situation has for a student and the way he or she discerns, delimits, and relates the central phenomena within the situations. This kind of understanding is supposed to develop through experience - the more extensive and the more varied the better Conceptual understanding refers to the way in which concepts are discerned and delimited from, and related to, the relevant domains of knowledge. Computer microworlds and simulations have potential for providing the students with extensive and varied experience of the phenomena involved, and it should hence contribute to the development of intuitive and conceptual understanding of them. This hypothesis has been the object of empirical investigations, one of which concerned two central concepts in mechanics, potential energy and moment of inertia. Forty-two second-year students were randomly assigned to work in pairs at one of two experimental conditions; both groups carried out a computer laboratory exercise, one involving potential energy and the other moment of inertia. Both experimental groups received a pre- and a postinterview in both conceptual areas, thus serving as control groups for one another Experimental comparisons could thus be made in both conceptual areas, and a global analysis was carried out focusing on changes in the students' intuitive and conceptual understanding. On the concept of potential energy no differences were found, probably due to the relative short working time in relation to the mathematical abstractness of the concept. On the concept of moment of inertia, on the other hand, a significant difference was found between the experimental and control groups. This was interpreted as a result of the intense work promoted by the computer simulation and especially the promotion of a student-student dialogue.