Enquiry learning and teaching about the nature of science (NoS) is a key element of science education. We have designed an experimental setting for students aged 12-14 years to exercise enquiry-learning skills and to introduce students to the NoS aspects of creativity and imagination. It also illustrates the impact of carbon dioxide on the growth…

At the Deutsches Museum in München, we established in the department of education during more than 35 years a series of historical experiments and constructed apparatus for pedagogic purposes. We use these reproductions mainly for continuing teacher education within our department. At the exhibitions of the Deutsches Museum there exist many…

Social media are a highly visible factor in the daily lives of our students. Why should teachers not take advantage of this and develop teaching and learning materials that use the designs found in such media to contextualise science learning? This article suggests some ideas for creating lab instructions using social media design as an innovative…

Humans are born with the natural ability to gain skills through play. Children learn about social norms, roles and responsibilities, and language through curiosity-driven, playful interactions and activities. Learning through play harnesses the power of children's imagination and inspires active engagement with the material. The Center for…

This paper discusses a set of easy, hands-on experiments that inquire into and differentiate among tattoo inks of varying quality. A classroom scenario is described for integrating these experiments into secondary school chemistry classes. Initial experiences from the classroom are also presented.

Prismatic refraction is a classic topic in science education. To investigate how undergraduate students think about prismatic dispersion, and to see how they change their thinking when observing dispersed images, five teaching experiments were done and analysed according to the Model of Educational Reconstruction. For projection through a prism,…

Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

Machine Learning methods for Performance Prediction in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have proven their efficacy; specific methods, e.g. Matrix Factorization (MF), however suffer from the lack of available information about new tasks or new students. In this paper we show how this problem could be solved by applying Transfer Learning (TL),…

In the context of joint decision-making, we investigated whether preschoolers alter the informativeness of their justifications depending on the common ground that they share with their partner. Pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 146) were introduced to a novel animal with unique characteristics (e.g., eating rocks). In the common ground condition,…

The 8-coin insight problem requires the problem solver to move 2 coins so that each coin touches exactly 3 others. Ormerod, MacGregor, and Chronicle (2002) explained differences in task performance across different versions of the 8-coin problem using the availability of particular moves in a 2-dimensional search space. We explored 2 further…

In many Western countries, non-formal education has become increasingly recognized as a valuable addition to the traditional educational system. In recent years, a special form of non-formal student laboratories (Schülerlabor) has emerged in Germany to promote primary and secondary practical science learning. This paper describes a developmental…

Carl Erich Correns (1864-1933) is remembered in the annals of science as one of the three botanists who re-discovered Mendel's laws. He can also, however, be regarded as one of the founding figures of classical genetics in Germany. Between 1894 and 1899 he carried out the crossing experiments with corn and peas that led to the re-statement of…

Digital intercultural training tools play an important role in helping people to mediate cultural misunderstandings. In recent years, these tools were made to teach about specific cultures, but there has been little attention for the design of a tool to teach about differences across a wide range of cultures. In this work, we take the first steps…

Movement perception facilitates spatial orienting of attention in infants (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000). In a series of 4 experiments, we investigated how orienting of attention in infancy is modulated by dynamic stimuli. Experiment 1 (N = 36) demonstrated that 5-month-olds as well as 7-month-olds orient to the direction of a…

Psychological research has documented again and again marked performance decrements whenever humans perform 2 or more tasks at the same time. In fact, the available evidence seems to suggest that any type of behavior is subject to such limitations. The present experiments employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to identify a…