Designing a Tool for an Innovative, Interdisciplinary Learning Process Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of Sourcing: A Case Study
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Content: Professional Background in the Field of Earth Resources’ Extraction
2.2. The Process of Creating an Innovative Educational Tool Oriented to the Field of Earth Resource Extraction
- Cognitive goals:
- To understand the complexity of the issue of resource extraction and earth resources in general.
- To learn to perceive and identify the relationships between reality and its material background and to understand the key importance of earth resources in this relationship.
- Gain the ability to understand analogies and model problem descriptions.
- Gain the ability to extract a problem from its complex verbal formulation or broader description and develop critical thinking skills.
- Value Goals:
- Acquire the ability to take an attitude towards things, phenomena, and work activities in their environment primarily in terms of their social, material, and energetic value.
- Operational Objectives:
- To acquire the ability to work cooperatively in a team and to deal operationally with tasks of a diverse nature.
- To learn how to actively use information technology in the educational process and in play at the same time.
- Material platform, which is a box containing boxes with objects (artifacts necessary for solving tasks).
- A virtual platform, which is a tablet containing an application necessary for the implementation of the individual tasks and stages of the game.
2.2.1. Description of the Material Platform
2.2.2. Description of the Virtual Platform
2.3. Evolution of an Innovative Educational Tool (IET) in the Light of the Need for Distance Learning
2.4. Collecting Data from Visits to Secondary Schools and Using Games in the Education Process
- Research questions (A, B, C) were defined for which null and alternative hypotheses (H0, H1) were formulated.
- The Research question was A: Can education using the tools of interdisciplinary competitions or games lead to a better understanding of the context of earth resource acquisition, compared to conventional education on aspects of these issues covered in individual subjects?
- ○
- A-H0: Education through an interdisciplinary competition or game does not provide a better understanding of the relationships in the field of earth resource extraction than conventional education within individual subjects.
- ○
- A-H1: Education through interdisciplinary competition or games provides a better understanding of the relationships in the acquisition of earth resources than conventional education within individual subjects.
- In order to test the hypotheses for research question A, a questionnaire was formulated with the following wording:
- 3.
- Research question B: Does information in the subject area acquired informally, through tasks fixed to experience, have a more lasting character than that acquired through standard formal channels?
- ○
- B-H0: Information given informally is not of a more permanent nature than the information obtained through conventional sources.
- ○
- B-H1: Information given in an informal way is more durable than information obtained in a conventional way.
- 4.
- In order to test the hypotheses for research question B, a questionnaire was formulated with the following wording:
- 5.
- Research Question C: Does the fact that the educational competition/game contains any 3D artifacts and tangible objects have an impact on the engaging nature of the educational competition/game?
- ○
- C-H0: The attractiveness of an educational competition/game is not enhanced by enriching it by adding 3D and tangible objects.
- ○
- C-H1: The attractiveness of the educational competition/game will be enhanced by adding 3D artifacts and tangible objects.
- 6.
- In order to test the hypotheses for research question C, a questionnaire was formulated with the following wording:
- 7.
- The subject questions for each research question were included in a questionnaire that also included questions aimed at verifying knowledge.
- 8.
- All participants first filled in a questionnaire where there were eight questions focused on students’ knowledge about gold and silicon and three questions focused on their opinion about learning through the game.
- 9.
- The participants were divided into two teams. Each team chose a captain who was to interact with the toolkit leader and chose an element.
- 10.
- A timeline was arranged.
- 11.
- There was a quiz (Figure 3), in which students could choose the number of points per question (100, 300, 500) and the area from which they wanted to answer the question. This also allowed them to practice their strategic thinking.
- 12.
- The team that had the higher number of points won.
- 13.
- Then, after the game, the students completed the same questionnaire again with the same questions.
3. Results and Discussion
3.1. Evaluation of the First IET
- Students perceived positively that they were learning in the form of a game, focusing on problem solving and they did not see the actual taking in of information as learning but as overcoming an obstacle to progress through the game.
- They rated individual tasks from moderately to very challenging. The tasks with the highest level of abstraction (tasks with educational sets) posed the greatest challenge.
- Overall, students expressed interest in this kind of learning.
- The issues presented were largely surprising to the students and many of the facts presented were described as fundamentally new.
- The overall impression of the presented content of the game was the clarification that the human society is directly intertwined with the raw material energy resources, their availability, and rate of use, with an emphasis on energy resources.
- The students largely lost the vision of simple solutions consisting of the quantitative substitution of non-renewable resources (mainly fossil fuels) by renewable resources, which did not reflect other aspects and their limits.
- Students presented concerns about the future direction of human society and the possibility of effectively addressing the problems related to the impact of human activity on the environment and climate change.
- Teachers unanimously expressed a positive attitude towards the implementation of IET in the teaching process as a means of gaining attention and engaging students in the process of acquiring interdisciplinary knowledge through team creative work in solving competitive tasks in the game itself. Educators also expressed surprise at the presented connections between different phenomena related to the use of earth resources. Educators expressed the view that it is very difficult to translate the complex issue of earth resource extraction into individual, differentiated teaching subjects pursuing primarily different objectives.
3.2. Evaluation of the Second IET
- Before playing the toolkit, the mean score for the knowledge questions was 5.4 points, while after playing it was 5.8 points.
- Before the game, none of the participants achieved full points, while after the game, eight students achieved full points.
- Before using the toolkit, 23 students had less than 5 points, while after using the toolkit only 15 students had less than 5 points.
- These findings are also presented in Figure 4.
- Before playing the game, students were relaxed and, after the game, which lasted almost 2 h, their attention and concentration were already reduced.
- Students may have felt less motivated to complete the questionnaire after the game, especially the team that lost the game.
- The students who did not improve may belong to a group of students who need a different learning approach other than listening and reading.
- The students were in a hurry to complete the questionnaire and, therefore, they did not pay the same attention to the answers as they did before the game.
- Students did not want to fill out the same questionnaire a second time and, therefore, answered “just so it is”.
4. Research Limitations
5. Conclusions
6. Patents
Author Contributions
Funding
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Group of Goals | The Text of the Target | Text of the Answers |
---|---|---|
Cognitive goals | Understand the complexity of the issue of obtaining raw materials and land resources in general. | “We were surprised by the connection between the common things around us and the energy sources and raw materials behind them.” |
“It looks like everything around us is completely dependent on raw materials and energies that we don’t even know where they come from or what is happening to them.” | ||
To learn to perceive and identify the relationships between reality and its material background and to understand the key importance of earth resources in this relationship. | “Without people knowing to use resources” efficiently, “our society probably wouldn’t have developed much and today we wouldn’t be where we are in both positive and negative ways.” | |
“It is already clear that RES are only part of the energy mix and the role of individual sources depends on many factors and is different for each country and economy, and therefore RES cannot be considered as a flat rate solution.” | ||
“Many fundraising activities take place completely outside of us, so we don’t think they exist, the more shocked they are of great importance to us.” | ||
Gain the ability to understand analogies and model problem description. | “It’s great as you can find in common things chemistry, mathematics, geometry, physics, biology and the like, that’s how it makes sense.” | |
“When we learn such things at school, the connections are not there or no one will tell us.” | ||
“I really liked that we went through the individual levels and it was necessary to complete things in order to find the code and go on, we wanted to win.” | ||
Gain the ability to extract the problem from its complex wording or broader description, development of critical thinking. | “It was probably the hardest thing to understand what the role involved in the coal and copper ore models was, but when you try to imagine it and realize that we have only indirect information about things underground, for example, it started to make sense. “ | |
“Those tasks with ‘sticks’ looked pretty scientific, we had to read it a few times to understand what we were supposed to do in the end, but then it went well.” | ||
“It was interesting to choose from a variety of answers that contained logical reasoning, but only one was correct.” | ||
Value goals | Gain the ability to take a stand on things, phenomena, and work activities in your environment, especially in terms of their social, material, and energy value. | “Now we understand that each person’s actions and attitudes contribute to the pressure on energy and raw materials.” |
“We already understand why the recyclability of some things, such as glass, copper, or iron, does not take into account the energy dimension of the problem, which is important to take into account.” | ||
“Replacing all those 100,000,000 barrels of oil a day with another energy source is probably quite unfeasible and at some point soon unrealistic.” | ||
“The link between the size of the human population and its material level and the degree of global environmental, economic growth, and climate impacts are still fully interlinked.” | ||
“The behavior of an individual in the system seems to be important, because of his direct energy consumption but also because of the demands on the raw materials and energy that are in the products he buys and so on.” | ||
Operational goals | Gain the ability to cooperate in the team and operationally solve tasks of diverse nature. | “It took us a while to share who would do what, but then it worked well when the tasks were divided; it saved time.” |
To learn to actively use information technology in both the educational process and the game. | “The fact that we had those things in our hands was great. The application in the tablet was well done, as such a guide, when we could not cope, so we read it again. The tools were also great after the wrong answer; you clarified enough.” |
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Rybár, R.; Gabániová, Ľ.; Rybárová, J.; Beer, M.; Bednárová, L. Designing a Tool for an Innovative, Interdisciplinary Learning Process Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of Sourcing: A Case Study. Processes 2022, 10, 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10010009
Rybár R, Gabániová Ľ, Rybárová J, Beer M, Bednárová L. Designing a Tool for an Innovative, Interdisciplinary Learning Process Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of Sourcing: A Case Study. Processes. 2022; 10(1):9. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10010009
Chicago/Turabian StyleRybár, Radim, Ľubomíra Gabániová, Jana Rybárová, Martin Beer, and Lucia Bednárová. 2022. "Designing a Tool for an Innovative, Interdisciplinary Learning Process Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of Sourcing: A Case Study" Processes 10, no. 1: 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10010009