Poster Gallery

Physics Seminars remove the notion that the teacher is central, encouraging self-directed learning. Interactions during seminars allow the teacher to engage students by linking concepts to everyday experiences. Through close student-teacher interactions a stronger sense of belonging and positive emotions can also be formed. Students access entire chapters of lecture resources uploaded to the Student Learning Space, prior to attending the Seminar, which provide culminating experiences. Classpoint, is used to motivate through gamification, with questions and polls to dipstick students’ readiness. Sensors and big data allow students to observe the effects of high-speed interactions. Conducting demonstrations, with real-life connections, in front of the seminar group allows the teacher to delve deeper into the sense-making of abstract concepts. Another important element would be the opportunity for the teacher to engage in Socratic questioning with the students, question-tossing, deepening students’ understanding of Physics concepts through questioning, in a safe and non-threatening environment.

In collaboration with SUTD, we conducted a four-part project (Project Photon Power) designed to introduce Junior College students to photovoltaic technology and foster a commitment to sustainability. The project aimed to blend hands-on learning with analytical skills development, inspiring students to explore the real-world impact of renewable energy.

The first session focused on exploring the fundamental properties of photovoltaic panels. Students engaged in hands-on activities to investigate how these panels convert sunlight into electricity, gaining a deeper understanding of the principles behind solar energy. In the second session, students built data collection devices using Arduino. This allowed them to experience the engineering aspects of data acquisition. The devices built are then left, facing various directions, exposed to sunlight for one full day for data collection. The final session centered on data analysis, where students were taught to interpret and make sense of the collected data, drawing meaningful insights about the performance and efficiency of photovoltaic technology.

This structured approach offered students an opportunity to bridge theoretical knowledge with practical application, underscoring the importance of sustainability and the potential of renewable energy solutions.

Marking and giving feedback on qualitative-type questions can be both tedious and time-consuming. To get around it in a timely manner, we tapped on two ICT tools – Google Forms and Gemini AI. We use Google Forms to collect the students’ responses before feeding them into the Gemini generative AI app to ‘grade’ their work and to provide feedback. However, the AI-assisted evaluation can vary from being too rigid to overly lenient, as the evaluation is strongly dependent on the prompt entered. Teachers still need to scrutinize the preliminary AI evaluation before giving the final feedback to the students. The greatest benefits are that it can expedite grading, address common misconceptions, free up valuable time for educators to focus on more targeted feedback and improve students’ analytical skills when answering qualitative type questions.