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Resources Guide
Our intention is to deliver useful resources for teaching and learning about physics to everyone interested. Thus we decided early on to
- offer only Open Educational Resources
- offer a variety of file formats
- offer language support
- care about accessibility
To create truly meaningful resources, we are developing guidelines. These are based on a study we conducted (still ongoing).[^1] See below for more information. Skipping the details now, for all static resources (basically everything excluding videos, audio and interactive) it is best to
- focus on the creation of figures
- keep text short and concise
- have different degrees of difficulty with at least one rather hard level
- refer to our comment guide
To keep a somewhat similiar style along the resources and to keep maintenance easy, we confined to work with Markdown. This is a way to represent text and a limited amount of multimedia in a WYSIWYM[^2] style, while being easy to work with. A quick intro can be found in the next chapters.
The study was conducted among teachers in Germany (around 30 as time of writing). Most of them teach at the Gymnasium (think of it as an American middle- and highschool in one). This wiki contains only a very short summary. You can find a lot more details and figures in the source linked below (Feel free to use deepl to get a tranlation).
The study showed that a lot of teachers look online for resources for their classes. Especially phyphox with its numerous possibilities is considered a great tool, but having too few resources available to have an appropriate impact.
To improve the availability we asked what teachers are looking for. There's a great need for four basic types of resources:
- Instructions for experiments
- Assignment sheets
- Solutions to these
- Videos
We also asked for the most important characteristics of these resource types. The results are the to-dos and their estimation of effort you will meet later in the archetypes.
Generally speaking, the resources developed for this database are a bit different from what teachers and mentors usually create for their classes. According to our study, when using external resources:
- Almost all teachers will edit texts or write them on their own anyway
- Teachers will gladly use good figures
- Teachers will eventually reduce the difficulty of tasks, but never increase it
- Commentary on the didactic decisions and experiences with the usage of the resource are greatly appreciated
[^1]: Marcel Kaiser, Anforderungsanalyse und Implementierung einer Datenbank für phyphox-Experimente, bachelor thesis (in German), 2024, Aachen
[^2]: What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) refers to a way of writing text on a computer. It means that you write code-like, and the computer uses a style sheet to turn that into the document you are goint to see. For example in Markdown, italics is written like this: *italics*.