CORRELATION BETWEEN OSCILLATORY MOTION AND GRAVITY REGARDED AS EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

Abstract

The author of the paper has been teaching physics at Academy of technical and educational vocationalstudies for the past seven years, of which two academic years took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. Internetresources have been applied beforehand throughout the entire period, but with fully online teaching, it gainedparticular importance. Educational approaches developed for online classes required students’ activities that wouldfurther motivate them to study. In the academic year 2021/22, educational contents were enhanced with additionallinking of certain educational contents, which resulted from the obvious need to make the material as interesting aspossible, and to awaken curiosity about the contents. In this paper it is shown how a specific digital simulation canbe used for a teaching topic for which it was not originally intended, and it was also shown that in this way a usefulcorrelation of different teaching contents can be realized. The significance of the above-mentioned correlation isreflected in the fact that it requires a teaching approach that leads to more effective learning process in class as wellas to greater motivation and greater activation of students in the class. A simulation related to the oscillation of amathematical pendulum is described in this paper, i. e. its ability to choose different strengths of gravitational fieldsin which the pendulum oscillates, i. e. different gravitational accelerations. It was researched how students thinkwhen for the given phenomena a zero gravity is approximated. It was researched whether the students realized achange in their activities both in class and in their motivation for work. It is interesting that only after theimplementation of weightlessness as an educational content in the existing educational content on oscillatorymotion, the teacher saw certain alternative conceptions that some students built when they were studying aboutoscillations.