Solar energy investigation activities for primary pupils

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 6, Issue 1, Article 7 (June, 2005)
Kit Fan CHO
Solar energy investigation activities for primary pupils
Experience sharing from a teacher of a solar energy school in Hong Kong

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Observations and Comments

1. Most of the pupils were highly motivated and excited to construct their small greenhouses. They worked collaboratively with some small "conflicts" happening occasionally. These "conflicts" were constructive and just showed that the pupils were actively presenting their own ideas. It was unexpected and encouraging that some "slow" learners were also highly motivated. This group of pupils, who was usually not asking questions in normal lessons, was very eager to ask their teachers concerning about technical problems and possible solutions of their work.

2. The greenhouse construction activity seemed to create an environment for active learning. I had one group of pupils who searched a lot of questions concerning solar energy from an encyclopedia. Since there was a service provided by local public library for schools to borrow books of a particular topic, a "Science Corner" was set up in our school library with books about energy resources borrowed from the Tsuen Wan Central Library. From our records, the loan rates of these books were tremendously high.

3. As a consolidation of various investigation skills for the pupils, case study was found to have two advantages over actual hands-on experiments.

Case study saves time and resources. It can be finished within a single period. It is not difficult to find stories about scientific discoveries. In the Secondary 1-3 Science curriculum, the first topic is "What is Science". It is easy to find stories of this kind in many Secondary 1 Science textbooks, such as "Dr. Jenner and Smallpox" and "Fleming and Penicillin" (Tao et. al., 2000).

The case study provided a real context to demonstrate the applications of scientific investigation. In Activity 1, all pupils were very excited in doing experiments but very few could give sensible answers to why learning the processes of investigation was important. After finishing the case study, pupils understood the sequence of the various steps they did in Activity 1 was actually the common practice done by many scientists.

4. Most of the General Studies teachers in my school, including me, were having little experience in scientific investigation. We worried about the greenhouse activity at first because it was quite open-ended. We are used to give pupils a task and then expect them to give same standard answer. We really worried that each group might give very different designs that we did not know how to comment. Actually, this situation did happen but we found this experience very interesting. We found that our pupils were more creative than us. The role of teachers is to equip pupils with the basic skills, such as what we did in Activities 1 and 2, and raise questions for them to solve. Our pupils have the ability to generate a lot of ideas and interesting solutions by their own if appropriate motivation has been given. There is no need for the teachers to know everything and answer all questions. Last year, we organized scientific investigation project described in this paper only for our Primary 5 classes. This year, we have the confidence to organize science projects for Primary 4 to 6 classes with some parts being open-ended in nature. For example, the project for Primary 5 this year is the production of traditional salted seafood on Ma Wan Island. Our pupils have visited some local fishermen there and have practiced the processes of making salted fishes and shrimps. They will later try various factors, such as amount of salt, sun light, wind condition etc., on the preservation of seafood.

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