Gadgets & Gizmos Phenomenon-Based Learning Series

What teacher – or student – can resist books with titles like these? The Gadgets and Gizmos books feature Drinking Birds, Dropper Poppers, Boomwhackers, Flying Pigs and more. These year-level appropriate experiments let students explore a variety of phenomena involving pressure and force, thermodynamics, light and colour, resonance, buoyancy and two-dimensional motion. The phenomenon-based learning (PBL) approach used by the authors is as educational as the demonstrations are attention-grabbing. Instead of putting the theory before application, PBL encourages students to first experience how gadgets work and then grow curious enough to find out why. Students engage in the activities not as a task to be completed but as exploration and discovery. The Gadgets and Gizmos books can help your students learn broader concepts, useful thinking skills, and science and engineering practices.