Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Science with eMates

Students with eMates Take to the Field:
Learning Science by Doing Science

by Ted Olsson, Ph.D.
Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow Regional Manager
for the Americas

Introduction
Try to remember when you were taking a high school science class--any class: biology, chemistry, or physics. Were you taking it because you were really interested in the particular course or because it was a requirement? How much of it do you remember? What value was the course to you in your later life? Switch roles now and think of yourself as the teacher. What was your purpose in teaching the course to students? What did you hope that they'd remember of your course a decade later? Given the pace of change in science and technology, where knowledge has a half life of about a decade, the most that one could hope to do for students in a science course today would be to help them understand some fundamental concepts, but even more importantly a way of thinking: a way of questioning, of hypothesizing, and of testing one's proposal. Perhaps most importantly, you would want to share with your students the passion for this quest that motivates true scientists and the way in which explanations, even accepted theories, are continually subject to this testing procedure. Teachers who could approach this goal for their students would have provided them a lasting legacy, whether or not they ever became scientists. Such a teacher would have given them the ability to become informed and skeptical citizens able to judge conflicting claims for public policy or personal purchases.

Today's science teachers realize that it is not enough to fill students minds with yesterday's formulas. Teachers must provide students with methods and thinking tools for tomorrow. One method of teaching science that has been particularly successful in introducing today's students to the significance of science is Microcomputer-Based Laboratories (MBL). In this pedagogy students use technology to learn the scientific procedures needed to solve real problems. Such classes often find the field to be as appropriate as the classroom or lab for their experiments. In such an extramural environment students still need tools to help them observe phenomena, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions. But what kinds of tools are available to support such inquiry?

In early February 1997 groups of eleventh grade students in David Tucker's science class at Mt. Baker High School in Bellingham, Washington, had the opportunity to assess such tools for field and classroom use. The tools were the eMate 300 computer (a distinctively shaped portable computer employing the Newton operating system) from Apple Computer, Inc. and eProbe hardware and software from the software developer Knowledge Revolution. Sensors connected to the eMate and the software allow students to read sampled data directly as a graph or as a table. With such tools students focussed on interpreting the significance of the data, keeping in mind the larger issues of the problem, becoming less mired in recording data.

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