The Collaborative Wall: A Technological Means to Improving the Teaching-Learning Process about Physics

Abstract

Nowadays, teachers seek to improve learning conditions and build new educational spaces through technological advances. This mixed research aims to analyse students’ perceptions about the use of the collaborative wall in the teaching-learning process for physics, considering data science. The collaborative wall is a web application that allows the participation of the students in the classroom through the dissemination of text and images. The participants are 77 students of the National Preparatory School No. 7 ‘Ezequiel A. Chávez’ who took the course of Physics IV during the 2019 school year. At home, these students searched for and consulted information about the physics of hearing in order to create their infographics collaboratively using the Piktochart software. During the face-to-face sessions, the teacher of the course of Physics IV requested the creation of teams (maximum six members) to carry out the collaborative activities and used the projector to show the collaborative wall. Subsequently, each team uploaded their infographics on the collaborative wall through mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones to initiate the discussion of the Physics of Hearing topics. The results of machine learning (linear regression) indicate that the dissemination of infographics on the collaborative wall positively influences participation in the classroom, students’ motivation, and the learning process about the physics of hearing. Data science identifies three predictive models about using the collaborative wall in physics through the decision tree technique. Finally, the collaborative wall facilitates the active role of the students during the face-to-face sessions, communication in the classroom and realisation of the collaborative activities.

Keywords

• collaborative wall
• collaborative activities
• student opinion
• data science
• physics education