Bridging the Gap between Physical and Abstract Worlds: Capturing Observed Phenomena in Abstract Models through MODELLINGSPACE

Observation and understanding of real world activities and phenomena is a basis of inquiry and reasoning and subsequently building of scientific knowledge. This involves moving from the perception of real world phenomena to constructing and exploring qualitative and quantitative relations that hold among the main elements. The transition between the two phases is not always smooth for the learners involved. In this paper, we present tools and activities that attempt to bridge the gap between the physical world experience and the abstract modeling and reasoning phase. Firstly, we discuss a modeling approach and the various representations involved. Then, we present the Video2Frames tool of ModellingSpace which is proposed to be used in order to create educational material by allowing the creation of abstract entities from video recordings of phenomena. Next an example of creation of educational material, using this approach is presented and discussed