By Ben Wagner, Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) student at Deakin University and In2science eMentor
As someone who has been a student and an educator in rural and online school environments, the shortfalls of practical and interesting STEM education in those environments have long been apparent to me. As a student learning chemistry and physics in high school, I desperately wanted to do what the scientific method described – in essence, to try things and see what happens, and attempt to understand why. Too often, however, the standard classroom experience in these subjects is dry and aggressively on rails, with “experimentation” consisting of students following a rigorously predetermined set of instructions to achieve a known outcome. Of course, this process does have value in allowing a large group of students to grasp the practical results of a subject under study, with minimal time and effort involved, but it falls very short in providing the sense of curiosity, surprise, and wonder that, in my opinion, is essential in reclassifying science from boring monotony to an area in which students feel they can make an impact.
I’ve been fortunate to work with In2science and La Trobe University recently to facilitate trials of FARLabs (Freely Accessible Remote Laboratories) with students from rural and remote schools via online eMentoring. FARLabs offers students the chance to exercise the curiosity and observational skills that are often neglected in traditional classes, by allowing them to directly operate equipment and view the results remotely over the internet, guided by a mentor, educator, or teacher. My approach to facilitating FARLabs sessions with eMentoring students involved a brief overview of the subject material the practical experiment covered (which they were often already studying in class), followed by an explanation of the FARLabs interface. Then, I would invite the mentee to click a button and see what happened. Often, they would require only a small amount of guidance to understand the outcomes of their actions, and the freedom offered would regularly result in questions that could be explored organically from examination of the experimental results. The remote nature of the experimentation allows the facilitator to offer the student as much freedom as they like without introducing safety risks, and the flexibility of the platform allows sessions to be as long or as short, and as in-depth or surface-level, as is required, making it extremely adaptable to both students and facilitators.
I sincerely hope to see platforms and initiatives like FARLabs incorporated into more education environments as time goes on, as I believe that encouraging curiosity and allowing true experimentation is essential in producing students that see STEM as a field of interest in their future.
If you are interested in exploring FARLabs with your students, contact project leader Dr David Hoxley.
