  Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to
students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted
room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In
order to encourage the socialization of information among group members, we
utilized a real-world problem where students were asked to generate a
well-structured physics task, and investigated how student groups collaborated
to create physics problems for younger students at an introductory physics
course at a university in northern Chile. Data collection consists of audio
recording the group discussions while they were collaborating to develop their
physics problems as well as the solutions they created to their problems.
Through interviews, we accessed students' perceptions on the task and its
challenges. Results suggest that generating problems is an opportunity for
students to propose ideas and make decisions regarding the goals of the
problem, concepts and procedures, contextual details and magnitudes and units
to introduce in their generated problems. In addition, we found evidence that
groups tested the validity of their creations by engaging in strategies often
observed with algebra-based physics problems, such as mathematical procedures
and qualitative descriptions of the physics embedded in the problem, yet groups
invested more time with algebra-based strategies compared to more qualitative
descriptions. Students valued the open-ended nature of the task and recognized
its benefits in utilizing physics ideas into context, which in turn enabled
collaboration in a way not experienced with traditional algebra-based problems.
These findings support the use of generative activities as a pathway for
students to engage in real-world physics problems that allow for a range and
variety of collective processes and ideas.
