Travis Pearson Artifact #2

The second Artifact that I will use is an artifact we used on the second to last class period we had. During that class we did a project building circuits with D-cell batteries, wires, and light bulbs. The reason I am using this artifact is that the teaching that Dr. Rudd has been teaching us all along about inquiry based learning finally rang true as I did the project. I had all these questions as we built different circuits and I really did learn a lot about how different wiring

techniques can change the outcome of circuits. I also understood more about wiring on a big scale such as in houses. Dr. Rudd emphasized since the beginning of the semester how important inquiry based learning is and how we should be asking our students questions as we have our lessons. We need to ask the higher level questions that really require them to reason and think things through. That way they really make that learning personal and will remember it. If we just ask one word answer questions than they will not learn how science works and will not be as excited to learn science either. When we get them asking questions and really into what they are doing, than they will be excited and will want to learn. I thought I knew this well, but in many of the projects we did, I already knew the answers because I had done them before so the inquiry learning never applied that much. In the project we did, I thought I understood circuits and light bulbs. I made a circuit just fine and when I added a second light bulb to the circuit the two lights got a bit dimmer just as I expected. Then I hooked up a parallel circuit with multiple lights and noticed that the two lights were just as bright as if there were only one light bulb hooked up. Having two lights hooked up or even three lights did not dim the lights as I thought it would. This really perplexed me and my group. We all thought the lights would be dimmer with more lights that we added. We began asking each other questions and throwing out ideas as to why it worked this way. We started trying different ways to connect the lights and trying to test our theories and hypotheses. It was a cool learning experience for our group. Afterward Dr. Rudd asked us questions to review what we had learned. He explained how when you wire a house you can use the different circuits to help in different situations. I grew up building houses and I learned things that I never knew about doing the electrical work in houses. It was made relevant in my own life the little experiment that we did in class. I felt like this is how science should be taught. We can give our students materials and some instruction and let them go at it while we ask some questions to help them move along. They will usually come up with questions on their own and can use their materials to come up with their own ideas and theories. The teacher guides them through questions and toward the end the teacher asks questions to help them make the experiment real for the students. It really hit home to me the importance of inquiry based learning is and how effective it can be.