Work in progress — Soil watering systems as teaching materials for technology education in junior high schools

In March 2008, the Japanese government announced the revision of the teaching guidelines for junior high schools, which are to be fully enacted in April 2012. According to the new guideline for the subject of Technology Education, “measurement and control by programming”, “growth of living things”, and “energy transformation”, which had previously been elective topics, are to become mandatory. Therefore, it will be necessary to develop compound teaching materials that can be used to teach these topics. In this research, we developed practical teaching material synthesizing these topics. The developed teaching material is an automatic watering system in which soil water is measured and used as feedback to control the watering mechanism. As a preliminary test before introducing this teaching material in junior high schools, we administered mock lessons to university students five times. The average scores for all the question items improved after the lesson, and the improvement was particularly remarkable for the questions about acquiring knowledge.