1982 Volume 22 Issue 3 Pages 1-7
The cognition of the conservation of energy by children is very poor. The reason for this is the shortage of the learning of the various phases of energy. The present condition of the children's cognition was studied on the concept of electricity, which seems to be most difficult to be understood by them among those phases of energy. The results of this study showed that it is difficult for children to understand this concept by the present elementary and middle school curricula, and many children are found to look upon electricity as material. On the contrary, many children think the static electricity as a kind of energy from their living experiences. These results lead us to conclude that the curriculum of electricity should start from the static electricity instead of dry battery and small lamp, in order to understand the electricity and the energy. From these considerations, a friction-type generator of static electricity and such accessary equipments as the Coulomb force measurement, the luminesence and glow light, the spark gap connected to the parallel-plate-condensors and the line of electric force are developed by this group under such philosophy that the equipments should reflect the children's living experience, be easy to understand the mechanism and to operate, and facilitate the quanitative measurement. The use of these equipments by the students of the elementary, middle and high schools and even by those of college was found to help the development of their concept such as the existence of two kinds of electricity, the analogy of various sources of electricity including the 100 V AC current, electricial quantity and voltage, and the relation between the generated quantity of electricity and the mechanical work. This report describes the actual conditions of the cognition of electricity concept by the students, the details of the equipments mentioned above and some of the effect for the students by using these equipments.
