Hands-on, minds-on activities to construct the concept of energy in primary school: Experiments, games and group discussions

In this article we present hands-on and minds-on activities about teaching and learning the concept of energy in primary school.The concept of energy is constructed by starting from the cause-effect relationship and focusing on the differences of potentials (increases and decreases in potentials) of the extensive quantities involved in the process of interaction being analysed. Subsequently, in order to lay the foundations for the concept of conservation, students are guided by the teacher to grasp the relationship between potential differences and the associated extensive quantity currents to build a (qualitative) budget law (relationships of direct or inverse proportionality): some increase in potential (effect) of an amount of an extensive quantity, at the expense of some reduction in potential (cause) of another amount of extensive quantity. The energy concept, then, arises from the identification of the “proportion” between two processes taking part in an interaction.The activities we propose are guided by the teacher following a didactic cycle with a semiotic approach designed to overcome the fact that the child may remain unaware of the connection between the concrete experiment and its underlying scientific concepts. This cycle, that leads to the transition from the concrete experiential level to that of the decontextualization and building of scientific meanings, includes experimental activities and games, individual production of outputs (oral and written texts, drawings, sketches, gestures, gazes and sounds...) and group discussions. We will present the activities and the didactic materials experimented with in a 5th grade classroom as well as the linguistic criteria defined and used to analyse pupil worksheets and conversations. We will also share the results which highlight evidence how children express their thoughts using “signs” that the teacher can then use to create a link between the concrete experiential plane and the conceptual one