Chapter 12
Stem, Inquiry Practices and Technology
in Physics Education
Ton Ellermeijer and Trinh-Ba Tran
Abstract How to make Physics Education more challenging, relevant and attractive
for our school students? How to stimulate the development of creative thinking,
problem solving, and other higher cognitive skills? What are the realistic conditions
that must be fulfilled so that teachers can realise this kind of quality Physics
Education? Governments in many countries stimulate science and technology in
schools; the more recent Alphabet Soup acronyms are IBSE, STEM (or STEAM),
and MINT (Germany). What is meant with that, and what are the main expectations?
And, can technology applied in physics education bring us closer to the desired
goals?
Clearly it has been demonstrated that technology can help to make physics
education more relevant, more linked to real life and more authentic. And can
increase the opportunities for own investigations by the students. So really has an
added value, and not just provides another way of teaching the same. This is known
for decades but still applied at a relatively small scale.
A major challenge is the preparation of teachers for using technology in this
direction. The authors recently investigated the development of an effective and
relatively short course for teachers to prepare them for the use of ICT/Technology in
IBSE lessons. The final course setup is based on several rounds of tryouts and
improvements, and has been applied in the Netherlands, Slovak Republic and
Vietnam. The course will be presented, some attention will be given to the differences in application in different settings (pre-service and in-service, different
Most part of the text is taken from the same authors’ work published in Pietrocola (ed.), Upgrading
Physics Education to Meet the Needs of Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96163-7_3.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.
T. Ellermeijer (*)
CMA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: ton@cma-science.nl
T.-B. Tran
Faculty of Physics, Hanoi National University of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam
e-mail: trinhtb@hnue.edu.vn
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
B. G. Sidharth et al. (eds.), Fundamental Physics and Physics Education Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52923-9_12
127
Stem, Inquiry Practices and Technology
in Physics Education
Ton Ellermeijer and Trinh-Ba Tran
Abstract How to make Physics Education more challenging, relevant and attractive
for our school students? How to stimulate the development of creative thinking,
problem solving, and other higher cognitive skills? What are the realistic conditions
that must be fulfilled so that teachers can realise this kind of quality Physics
Education? Governments in many countries stimulate science and technology in
schools; the more recent Alphabet Soup acronyms are IBSE, STEM (or STEAM),
and MINT (Germany). What is meant with that, and what are the main expectations?
And, can technology applied in physics education bring us closer to the desired
goals?
Clearly it has been demonstrated that technology can help to make physics
education more relevant, more linked to real life and more authentic. And can
increase the opportunities for own investigations by the students. So really has an
added value, and not just provides another way of teaching the same. This is known
for decades but still applied at a relatively small scale.
A major challenge is the preparation of teachers for using technology in this
direction. The authors recently investigated the development of an effective and
relatively short course for teachers to prepare them for the use of ICT/Technology in
IBSE lessons. The final course setup is based on several rounds of tryouts and
improvements, and has been applied in the Netherlands, Slovak Republic and
Vietnam. The course will be presented, some attention will be given to the differences in application in different settings (pre-service and in-service, different
Most part of the text is taken from the same authors’ work published in Pietrocola (ed.), Upgrading
Physics Education to Meet the Needs of Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96163-7_3.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.
T. Ellermeijer (*)
CMA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: ton@cma-science.nl
T.-B. Tran
Faculty of Physics, Hanoi National University of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam
e-mail: trinhtb@hnue.edu.vn
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
B. G. Sidharth et al. (eds.), Fundamental Physics and Physics Education Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52923-9_12
127