Flipped Learning Lesson Plans on the Science Center Experimentarium in Copenhagen

Though most teachers find formal learning activities an important part of a class visit to a science center, research indicates that formal learning is seldom the outcome. Instead visits tend to become"soda visits" without preparation, learning goals, and connection to the subjects taught back in school. [1, 2]. To accommodate these challenges at the Copenhagen science center Experimentarium, they started a partnership with the teacher education at University College Copenhagen in 2017. In the collaboration, eight flipped learning lesson plans were developed to assist the visiting teachers frame the teaching before, during, and after the visit [3]. This paper investigates the actualized learning potential [4] throughout one of the lesson plans (”Dikes and gates”). The objects of the analysis and investigation are 24 8th grade students and their teacher as they engage with the learning materials.
The data is analyzed with Engeström´s activity theory [5] and the notion of hard and soft scaffolding [6,7, 8]. The data production consists of sound recorded teacher interviews, sound recordings of the lessons, and recordings of selected student’s view by videoglasses during the learning activities. Though the 8th grade teacher finds learning material essential as a tool for scaffolding formal learning for visiting classes, multiple contradictions are identified between the design of the learning material and the actual usage. This indicate the need of a tool to identify the complex relations in the context of development of flipped learning materials on science centers. A preliminary model for such a tool is
presented here.