Environmental Science Investigation – Challenges and opportunities

Other conference contribution, 2008

Swedish high school students are generally well informed about the threat of global warming to our planet. However, in order to understand the scientific challenge we are facing, students need to learn how to do scientific research. Emerging and innovative information and communication technologies offer new possibilities to present scientific facts and to teach scientific methods in contemporary school settings. In our paper, we present and discuss pedagogical issues and the design development preceding the production of a virtual laboratory destined to become a tool for students when learning about the impact of global warming on fish reproduction. A number of challenging issues arose during the development phase and the formative evaluation sessions that were held during spring 2008. Some examples: What are we trying to transmit when teaching students “to do science”? Are the proposed experiments most efficient when showing ambiguous and thought-provoking results or is a pedagogical approach where the user is guided through the experiments and given clues in order to “reveal” an explicit result, more useful?