Aprendizagem baseada em projetos: mediando o ensino de temas de física por meio do microcontrolador

Abstract

This work presents the results of a set of teaching activities in a simulation environment using educational robotics designed to provide students with contact with concepts of Physics, using Project-Based Learning (PBL). The main objective was to contribute to the teaching of the areas of Science and Technology. PBL requires a projection to be carried out, culminating in a product and needs methodological steps to achieve its realization. The activities were carried out in two classes of undergraduate Physics Education at the State University of Ponta Grossa, one in the first year and the other in the third year. In the first-year class, the chosen project was the historical milestone of the fifty years of the Apollo 11 mission. Each of the activities developed sought to explore topics on the four areas of Physics, such as Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Electricity, and Modern Physics. For the third-year class, students were directed to activities on rocket launching. Both activities used Educational Robotics, creating prototypes with Arduino and other microcontrollers. All activities were carried out during the year 2019. The research was of an applied and field, exploratory nature. The aim was to verify if classes using active methodology could contribute to teacher training. To carry out the verification, the following objectives were set: to evaluate the potential of educational robotics in learning physical concepts; to develop skills and competencies of physics students for problem-solving. With the analysis of the documents submitted and observations of the students' responses about physics concepts before the application of the product, it was demonstrated that the PBL approach contributed to the acquisition of Physics concepts and showed a significant improvement in problem-solving. This improvement was demonstrated both in the way of approaching the problems that arose during the project's execution and in the speed with which solutions were found. Another point that was also verified was the autonomy that some students showed at the end of the project. The main product that emerged from the application was a book that presents a guide for the use of the ESP32 microcontroller by physics educators, from the installation of programs, data acquisition through the internet, and visualization of data in real-time graphs. Another contribution that the thesis brought was the construction of a web platform that allows teachers and students to interact with the rover, analyzing telemetry graphs to investigate possible causes for the values observed in the graphs. This platform is available through the address labtec28.info.