Towards didactical activities of modelling in physics with micro-computers. Examples : trajectories, striking and bouncing of rotating balls.
Alain DUREY, these d'état, 1987
This work was made under the context of the introduction of the microcomputers into French secondary education. We took part since the first years in this innovative movement and it is through this experiment inside this process that we tested the need to think the possible uses of the computer in teaching. 
We expose in the first chapter an investigation into the uses of the computer in the professional practices using physics (scientific research, technological development, industrial production). Then we describe the modes of use of computers in teaching, and we make the comparison of the professional practices and the teaching practices on the example of the software of national education available at the end of l986. This chapter makes it possible to locate the contemporary evolutions in the professional practices using physics, compared to the existing school activities. It then makes it possible to give the state of the situation. We define our problems then as a project of installation of uses of data processing in the teaching of the physics whose link with professional practices ("activities of reference") can be established and controlled and who is in addition within a given school framework. 
To carry out this project in the long term we did not start from an existing knowledge, nor even of a practice of reference thoroughly selected which one would have adapted, simplified, made compatible with the school framework ("transposed"), but on the contrary we left the school framework to go towards the practices of reference. We set constraints of program, average hardware and collections of data and we explored the possibilities of reaching results likely to be used outside the school framework. The models thus developed opened to us the way of contracts of studies in the field of Sciences and Techniques of the sports activities. We thus could traverse the path which carries out of a possible school practice to practices of reference related to the technology of the sport. We describe in the chapter the two successive models which we worked out, the methods which were employed, the results which interested of the school extra users and finally the search made under contract. 

This unit constitutes the material on which carries the analysis and the attempt at made generalisation in chapter 3. We try to formalise two essential ideas which appear to us to characterise the practices of reference thus reached. They call both upon the concept of model and modelling. First relates to the relationship to establish between the models and the systems, the phenomena, the experiments in an empirical field of application ("empirical referent"). An analysis on three examples shows the difference in nature between the systems studied within the school framework and those studied in the extra-curricular field and suggests tracks for the choice of these system-models for teaching. Second relates to the step of modelling by successive approximations of which we propose a description in four phases. This analysis of the practices of reference constitutes a methodological guide for the production of school activities and their comparison with the activities of reference. It was also used us to conceive and carry out a project of teachers' training on which we give some indications.