Physics outreach to improve the conceptual application skills for high school students

Abstract

Physics outreach is one of the exciting media for learning the phenomena. Many sophisticated tools are developed and used in various purposes both in the form of virtual-based equipment, computing, and simulation designed to build a sense of interest in physical phenomena. These expensive tools are not available for a rural school. This study is to utilize simple physics outreach to encourage student learning interest. There are many opportunities in applying physics outreach using materials collected from the around of school. This research is quasi-experimental research with pretest and posttest one group design. The objective of this research is to find out the influence of the outreach program to the conceptual application skills. The learning media for outreach activities include Heron' fountain, Lift of the wing, and mosquito's spray. Pretest and posttest were measured using the essay problems. These problems were arranged for higher-order thinking skills of Bloom taxonomy. The statistical technique of analysis the result was paired sample T-test (two-tailed, alpha = 0.05). Based on this study, there is a significant improvement on the conceptual application skill after the student was taught using this media. The main factor of this increase was fun activities during learning.