I am a 6th grade teacher at an inner-city school in Phoenix, Arizona. One of the best ways I have found to motivate children and get them excited about school is by having them do hands on experiments.
Children love to manipulate variables and make predictions about possible outcomes.
In the world of virtual space, concepts and ideas can be shaped in ways that would be difficult or impossible to do in the real world. This new type of manipulation challenges the way traditional experimentation has been done. One series of experiments my students did recently was to see what effect different surfaces had on the velocity of a moving object. We used several different types of toys as the objects to be measured. We then propelled them over a number of different surfaces and measured how far each one traveled.