Watcharee Ketpichainarong

Creating young scientists through community science projects

Abstract This research aimed to develop an STS-based learning unit on biological control to enhance scientific inquiry capability of secondary school students through community science projects. It was framed by the science-technology-society (STS) teaching approach, and focused on collaboration between individual students, peers, teachers, agriculturists, and local experts. Students were assessed for their scientific inquiry ability at the beginning and the end of the learning process using five instruments: experimental skill test, students’ laboratory reports, students’ science projects, semi-structured interview and classroom observation. The results showed that the STS-based learning unit on biological control helped students gain significant improvement in scientific inquiry. They were able to apply and integrate the scientific knowledge learned in both classroom and field studies to help solve agricultural problems in their own communities. Moreover, this learning unit encouraged students’ skills in solving problems in other situations.

A Demonstration Setup to Simulate Detection of Planets outside the Solar System.

We constructed a simple demonstration setup to simulate an extrasolar planet and its star revolving around the systems centre of mass. Periodic dimming of light from the star by the transiting planet and the stars orbital revolution simulate the two major ways of deducing the presence of an exoplanet near a distant star. Apart from being a visual aid for those needing help, the setup also elicited unexpected questions and suggestions from students, who achieved a fairly good level of understanding of the basis for the transit and radial velocity methods.