LESSON 8- Teaching with Contrived Experiences

The second from the base of the Dale's Cone of Experiences is contrived experience. These experiences are edited copies of reality and are use as a substitutes for the real things when it is not practical nor impossible to bring the real thing in the classroom and are designed to simulate to real life situations.


Models, mock-up, specimen and object(artifacts), simulation and games are contrived experiences.

There is a difference between a game an a simulation. games are played to win while simulation need not have a winner, simulation seems to be more easily applied to the study of the issues rather than to process. 

We should make use of contrived experiences to overcome limitation of space and time, to edit reality for us to be able to focus on parts or process of the system that we intend to study, to overcome difficulties of size, to understand the inaccessible and help the learners understand abstraction.




MODEL of a carbon atom                                                 MOCK-UP of the planetarium
SPECIMEN of a dissected frog