Using Online Synchronous Interschool Tournaments to Boost Student Engagement and Learning in Hands-On Physics Lessons

We present the results from a 90-min session in which 196 fourth grade students from 13 classes from 11 schools performed a series of engaging, hands-on activities. These four activities were designed to help students understand how rockets fly. During the activities, students use skateboards, toy cars, springs, balls, and water rockets to model the physics behind a rocket launch and predict the proportion of water that will lead to maximum elevation. A subset of the classes took a post-test involving 22 basic physics questions, presented in the form of a 60-min online synchronous interschool tournament. The other subset of classes also answered the same questions online in sixty minutes, though in this case they were not presented as a tournament. The students who participated in the tournament improved significantly more than the rest. Moreover, students with weak academic performance who participated in the tournament improved the most, reducing the gap with the academically stronger students. Lessons involving hands-on experiments using skateboards, toy cars and water rockets are already highly engaging. However, this experience shows that using technology to connect schools synchronously through an online tournament is a powerful mechanism for boosting student engagement and learning in core science concepts. Furthermore, we compared learning outcomes with a previous year face-to-face interschool tournament. With the online synchronous interschool tournament, students learned twice as much as they did with the face-to-face interschool tournament.