Science, Sport and Technology - A Contribution to Educational Challenges

One of the major educational challenges, at all degrees, is how to improve students' ability to link knowledge with real life practice, through enhancing children or teenagers' ability to think critically by way of making observations, posing questions, drawing up hypotheses, planning and carrying out investigations, analysing data and therefore improve their decision making. Learning through sports can be effective for developing life skills because sport has a potential to contribute over a wide range and is a discipline that most children like. The constructions of real situations or "Problems" must achieve and incorporate certain aspects such as (a) encourage curiosity, (b) be perceived by students as relevant to their personal goals, (c) represent a motivated challenge, (d) stimulate group collaboration for older students, (e) technological equipment as a way of support, to motivate the learning process, and (f) demonstrate how simple scientific concepts can improve everyday activities. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate the usefulness of the representative tasks created by a systematic integration of approaches (electronic and non-electronic devices) with interactive situations. Four tasks were applied to 140 children between 6-10 years old at elementary school level. The tasks were constructed considering the follow proposals: (1) promote the benefit of physical activity and (2) explore some science concepts using sport. To evaluate the process effectiveness, two groups were formed, group A was submitted to a more theoretical explanation of the concepts and group B was exposed to problem solving through sport situations. Data were analysed by using quantitative methods. Results show that when children participate in an active way they are more motivated, and the use of their own movement or body to resolve a problem (with electronic devices) contributes for knowledge acquisition by adapting their actions and looking for the best window of possibilities to solve the task situation. Further and longitudinal studies are recommended to consolidate the results.