Spreadsheets in Science
Andrew W Barclay · Physics Education · 1996
This book and its associated disks provide the student or teacher with a variety of good spreadsheet play opportunities. The choice of experiments and range of topics have been strongly influenced by the English National Curriculum. This influence does not cause a very structured set of experiences. The 28 chosen contexts are a rather motley collection of experiments and data analysis situations picked from biology, chemistry and physics. This provides a wide audience for this package in a school. The authors' idea of producing pre-prepared templates complete with the relevant data is certainly a valuable resource for modern learning experiences. It remains true, though, that the quality of the user's experience is very likely to be controlled by the facilities available in the spreadsheet software package into which the data are loaded. This is especially true where graphs are involved. It was disappointing to find that in some of the activities certain `trial formulae' were included in the spreadsheet cells which no science teacher should ever suggest (e.g. V + I). This unreal arithmetic process should not appear in learning guides, neither should pupils be encouraged to add weight to distance in the context of studying moments even if the units are not mentioned. However, spreadsheets such as these with carefully prepared headings do save a teacher or pupil a large amount of time in the assembly of data for analysis. The production of a commercial package which has worksheets that may be photocopied does provide a teacher with an entry point to the use of spreadsheets in the laboratory and science classroom. This book should help many teachers to have the confidence to develop their own master templates. The section on the generation and analysis of reaction time data requires a little careful thought about the number of significant figures to maintain. In the given experiment, for example, pupils who choose to use a centimetre ruler could reasonably expect the computer to show three significant figures so as to encourage measuring to the nearest millimetre. The reviewer used a PC version of Excel to interact with the disk files supplied as part of the package and found that each template did operate as described in the text. Identification of the appropriate file for each activity, though, does require the user to scan through the text as the file labels do not appear in the same place in each case. Although the National Curriculum target number and references are clearly placed in the heading, this does not necessarily make the package more attractive for long-term use or for those who prefer to operate via themes or titles rather than via numerical or coded references. Considering the freedom to copy the paperwork and also to alter the data files, and despite some of the weaknesses of the resources in a few of the activities selected, many teachers will welcome a copy to help them move forward in their use of spreadsheets in a learning situation.