2019 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 308-322
Among science education areas at junior high school, astronomy learning is difficult because it requires learners to understand phenomena from both a ground-level perspective and a space perspective. In this study, we first developed a software to help learners understand the sun’s diurnal motion from the ground-level perspective. A practice with the software showed that it could improve the understanding of the transparent hemisphere, but it did not significantly improve the understanding of the sun’s diurnal motion. We focused on the possibility that the learners were not conscious of important phenomena such as sunrise, sunset, and culmination. Thus, in the next phase, we developed a software through which learners intentionally learn this information using gamification. As a result, the understanding of the sun’s diurnal motion in each season was significantly improved. Also, from the result of the delayed test, we confirmed the importance of understanding the ground-level perspective correctly before learning the space perspective, and that our software is effective for this purpose.
