In the contribution we demonstrate the activity/project that we carry out in Slovenia for ten years. It is a practical activity that addresses mainly pupils at the end of primary school – in Slovenia this is at the age between 12 and 15. The activity involves aspects that are not typical for main stream educational processes and this gives excellent opportunity to gifted children to express themselves in a different way.
Looking from outside, the main goal of the project is that a group of pupils constructs and builds a mechanical contraption that satisfied well defined constraints on how it must begin and end. This enables the deployment of an arbitrarily long chain of succeeding contraptions that fit together as one long device that “does something”. The name “chain experiment” reflects the domino like execution of the set of contraptions. As the activity was first carried out in 2004 as a part of the World year of physics 2005 celebration, a group of pupils should include some interesting physical phenomena in their contraption. This is the framework of the activity as seen from outside.
The inside content of the activity is much richer. First of all, the pupils can let go their imagination regarding what physical concepts the contraption shows and also what the story behind the contraption is. Secondly, the project is done in a group. This stimulates different abilities of the members of the group to be more pronounced or developed. Thirdly, such a project mimics a real life situation by first searching for an idea and then putting the idea into a concrete realisation. Last but not least, the group should be composed of gifted and average pupils in order to get the best results.
As gifted pupils have on one hand similar needs as all children and are on the other hand often more demanding or have specific needs in particular aspects of life, such a medium term mixed abilities group project is well suited for them. The group has a goal that is well constrained, but has a lot of freedom in actual content, so some children can participate with ideas and solutions of the problems that pop up along the way from the idea to the end product – the contraption. At the same time the pupils with different abilities can contribute more by making parts of the contraption or by organizing the work of the group or simply by discussing different options when deciding about and building the contraption. The activity provides a sort of spontaneous social setting that is challenging enough to motivate the gifted pupils and gives them at the same time a feeling of safety as members of the group in which the tasks and responsibilities are divided among all members.
In the demonstration we will show some examples of the contraptions, explain their operation, and discuss how the pupils participated and what they gained by participating in a particular group.