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1.INTRODUCTIONScience and Technology (S&T) has become one of the crucial factors for the development and sustainability of all countries. Today, most countries around the world have focused in building knowledge societies with qualified workforces through science learning and thinking processes1. For optics and photonics (OP), it is a fascinating subject for science learning because it inherently composes of art and science at the same time and it surrounds us in our everyday activities. With this awareness, several international and local organizations have offered optics programs, ideas, and processes in teaching optics suitable for primary and secondary school students. They also promote the use of elementary optics in daily life in the development of physical thinking for primary school students2. A variety of innovative ideas and methods in teaching optics has also been proposed for teachers3-9. Apart from the ideas for teaching OP, many educational kits have been developed as hand-on demonstration tools10-20. For Thailand, the core theme21 of S&T learning has been recently established where the S&T learning process22 is applied as shown in Figure 1. With this core theme, teachers or instructors can arrange the proper courses followed the core curriculum and related them to the students and local communities. From those seven areas of science learning, OP is contained in the energy and astronomy sections. They cover basic properties of light such as laws of reflection and refraction, absorption, energy conversion, propagation behaviors of different light sources, and dispersion of white light (see Figure 2). However, as OP is not clearly emphasized in the course, it comes to primary school students as a new technical word that sometimes steers them stay away from learning with it. In addition, there is a discontinuity in learning OP in that they will learn more about it 3-4 years after finishing the K4 level. Additionally, lack of simple educational kits, inefficiency in demonstration, and unskilled science teachers are three key limiting factors that prevent students in primary and secondary schools to pay their attention to science and OP in their future study. With these issues in mind, we bring in our learning-by-playing approach to teach and motivate students in primary schools23. We also develop the inquiry-based24 with critical thinking process and combine it with child aspect consideration. This paper shows our assessment and lessons learned from 21 schools in different parts of Thailand. 2.OUR PEDAGOGICAL KEY APPROACHRealizing that primary school students are playful by nature, we utilize this attribute into our approach so that they enjoy learning our activity. In order to assist them envisage the basic OP and its applications in everyday life, a combination of the inquiry-based with critical thinking process and the learning-by-playing approach is our key approach to leverage the OP education in primary schools. We arrange the topics in accordance with fundamental optics and applications that can easily be observed around students. All topics in our approach are shown in Table 1. In addition, we bring into the field optical devices and components that the students have seen or used them before but they do not realize the principles behind. For example, an optical fingerprint scanner is used for their exploration of law of refraction and total internal reflection phenomenon. A multicoated eyeglasses is used to guide them to the optical interference. The use of a CD or a DVD helps us to easily demonstrate the diffraction of white light and to investigate the spectrum of laser and other light sources. Table 1.OP learning topics in our approach.
2.1“Long Len” Photonics Kit23An educational kit is a vital tool in our learning-by-playing approach. Previously we developed our educational photonics kit suitable for practical teaching in both primary and secondary levels. Its name is “Long Len” which in Thai language means “Just plays with it”. The kit is able to demonstrate six main contents in OP as shown in Figure 3. Components in our educational kit consist of four main parts: optics, electronics, accessories, and manual written in Thai language25. Even its plastic suitcase can also be used as a component during some demonstrations. Some parts can be used in several topics. In addition, they can be used for topics that are not related to OP depending on adaptability of teachers or instructors. Our instruction in the manual is designed to guide them along the main topics of OP. Examples of components and demonstrations are shown in Figure 4. 2.2Learning-by-playing ApproachProcedure diagram of our learning-by-playing approach is called 5E’s and it is shown in Figure 5. Step 1: Posing QuestionThis step is significant to initially inspire primary school students, and therefore the first question to engage them should be simple and it should be related to OP around them. If most students in the class can answer the question, we then encourage them in the following open-ended question in order to bring them into our critical thinking process. Examples of our open-ended questions are shown in Table 2. Table 2.Examples of questions.
Step 2: PlayingIn this step, we challenge the students to explore or prove the discussion or solution from our questions in the step 1. We give them all needed components from our Long Len kit that are related to the topics. Prior to playing, we have to introduce students the safety rule concerning using a laser pointer, a light emitting diode (LED) regulator, a light detector, an electrical light bulb, and other electronics equipments. The students subsequently involve in hand-on playing in order for them to explore their critical thinking. At this stage, we are now their assistant. Close observation is also vital to conduct and guide the students before they get confused. Step 3: ConcludingThis step is to assist the students to analyze what and how they learn from the above step in order to gain the asset of OP knowledge and scientific skill. We lead the students gradually to explain what they have learned during their playing. We also bring them into the critical thinking process again. The students have to conclude points of learning and knowledge gained during the above steps. Step 4: ExpandingThis step needs students to be able to expand their knowledge to things around them. We can pick up a phenomenon of light to start with. Moreover, if we observe any application of optics or photonics in the class, we use it as a problem for the students to find out the explanation. Step 5: QuizWe end up our approach with quizzes. This step is to evaluate the understanding of the individual student. We ask each student to review his or her thinking and knowledge. Since our approach is informal and no point affects students, we have to make this step more exciting in order to get their cooperation. This can be done by giving them some souvenirs if they can answer our questions correctly. 3.EVALUATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNEDWe visit 21 primary schools in every part of Thailand. In particular, we focus on the schools in the rural area in Payao, Ratchaburi, Ubolratchathani, Nakornsridhamarach, and Srisakes provinces. There are 1018 students covering 96 in the grade four, 340 in the grade five, and 582 in the grade six. It can be seen that 57.2% of students is in the grade six because they already learned some basic optics and we anticipate them to gain some benefits so that they can more or less plan their future study. Due to our limited 2-3 hours of demonstrations, we separate students in each school into two groups. The first group is focused on white light dispersion, imaging light intensity, and color reflection. The other group learns more about reflection, refraction, and energy conversion. Figure 6.Snapshots of student activities for (a) energy conversion with the use of a solar cell, (b) white light dispersion with LEDs and a prism, (c) imaging using a plastic ball and a convex lens, (d) color dispersion, and (e) an application of refraction by combining a laser pointer with a cylindrical lens to generate a line of light.  3.1EvaluationsTo examine our approach, we end our demonstration with the student evaluation. Our evaluation form has two parts. The first part contains choice assessment while the latter part is for open-minded outlook. For the first part of the evaluation, students mark their desired choice in each topic. Analysis of all evaluation data in this case is shown in Table 3. Table 3.Evaluation results from primary school students.
Table 3 indicates that our learning-by-playing approach with critical-thinking process helps students gain more knowledge about OP with fun. In this high evaluation, we also find that some of them knew some topics but they understood more. Less than one percent of students consider all topics excluding energy conversion are normal. The remaining percentage of students regards our approach boring because they gained nothing in particular to the color absorption and the imaging. We intensely look into the percent of students in the boredom section in order to find out what are the motives behind their evaluations. We believe that communication skill of each instructor, personality of both the instructor and the student, and misconception of students play important roles. We also find that a few students in this group are in the schools located at the frontier and have weak communication in Thai language. Some students need specific teaching style. Those two student types are shy to encounter and interact with us. In addition, based on advices from some students, putting them in the front seat helps get their involvement. 3.2Lessons LearnedWe obtain a variety of lessons learned from the primary school students with our learning-by-playing approach. Our lessons have two main parts. The first part receives directly from the observation and interaction:
The second part gets from the evaluation form:
Apart from having their hands-on our photonics kit, plain-text explanation and friendly conversation are necessary to get their cooperation. 4.CONCLUSIONSWith our learning-by-playing approach, most of primary school students in the grades 4-6 are capable of understanding advance optics and photonics. Our open-playing technique assists the students in opening their mind for learning. A significant point in this approach for Thai students is that instructors or teachers have to effectively organize students into the topics. Inspiring them is a first step in getting student attention. Then with proper demonstrations and communication skill, students are able to have critical thinking in some topics and show more interactions through the end of the class. From our assessment, we discover that most of participated students have fun during our class and gain more knowledge in OP. In addition, we have learned many lessons from the primary school students that will be taken into consideration to improve our activities. Further works include more effective ways to inspire students, to keep them learning OP, and to embed them with a critical-thinking process. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAuthors would like to thank NSTDA, SPIE, OSA and IEEE-LEOS for financial support. We are grateful to Miss Tiwaporn Polnpanich, an education officer in Payao, for her coordination with the schools in Payao. Mr. Srisombati Bhumkeaw, the director of DonModDang Wittakom School and his family, for their management of the schools in Ubolratchathani. Special thanks to all PTL members for their contribution to valuable discussions. REFERENCESMichaels, S., Shouse, A. W., and Schweingruber, H. A., Ready, Set, Science!: Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms, The National Academies Press,2007). Google Scholar
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