La mostra "Divertiesperimenti" come ponte tra l'apprendimento informale e il formale nell'insegnamento della fisica nella scuola secondaria

2015 - 2016The actual surveys highlight that teaching scientific disciplines it gives often-inadequate results, in Italy particularly, and it emerges that, in general, the educational aspects of the teaching of the Physics are not enough take in account. Usually, the students consider the physics a distant, incomprehensible and difficult discipline: I have verified with the present work as, on the other hand, the teaching of physics could be engaging and stimulating, and entertaining in discovery and fun activities. The research study is therefore based on the need: - To improve the knowledge and the skills related to the teaching and learning of scientific disciplines at school; -to experiment educational methodologies and strategies for teaching Physics more effectively. This topic is complex and it is not easy to transfer educational research in the real classroom, so this work cannot aspire to be complete and exhaustive. I tried to give a contribution to the physics educational research starting from the description of the main issue, as well as of the potentialities, taking account of the actual situation, also normative, in the Italian Secondary School. Then, I have experimented some psico-pedagogic methodologies and I have proposed some original models of good practices. I tried to answer to the question: What contribution can I provide starting from the informal learning, through a didactic laboratory centred on a mini University Science Center, for the construction of new competences in Physics of the students and the teachers? My work: • From the point of view of the methodological aspects was based on Laboratory teaching, and in particular using the Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE) approach; the IBSE is a scientific inquiry that starts from exploration of phenomena, based on constructivism paradigm and experimental teaching. This methodology is among the most recommended for teaching science, for its applicability and for good educational outcomes. • From the point of view of the laboratory equipment, I mainly used the interactive experiments of the collection "DivertiEsperimenti"; "DivertiEsperimenti" (“Fun-experiments”) is the collection of interactive exhibits, I designed for the Department of Physics at the University of Salerno according to the model of the Exploratorium of San Francisco [1], [2]. This collection of experiments aims to enable the public, especially the school, to "manipulate" and familiarize themselves with many physical phenomena, through an informal and even entertaining approach. New way of teaching and learning the formalization of knowledge, to be effective, have to activate the motivation and creativity of the learners, just as the scientist does during his research. Informal and non-formal learning are therefore gaining more and more a prominent role. An important question remains how to use informal learning in science to build formal knowledge... [edited by Author]XXIX n.s

A Teacher Training: Physics Enquiry from University to High School”

To reduce the gap between high school and educational research, the Department of Physics at University of Salerno (Italy) has planned and implemented various training courses aiming at helping high-school teachers to introduce new didactical strategies and specific tools for Physics. From this perspective, the Department has been involved in the teacher training program of the European project “Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated” (TEMI). As it is required by this project, as the first step a group of thirty teachers has been involved in a four days workshop, which has consisted of sixteen hours of lessons and laboratory activities. During the second step of the project, teachers have been motivated to implement in their own classes some of the activities proposed in the first step, using TEMI methodology. Finally, as the third step, we have discussed a comparison of the results obtained by the teachers into the classes. All these activities have been based on the principles of the "Inquiry based science learning” (IBSE). The "Inquiry" methodology has been activated by the TEMI trainers during all the phases of the project, in order to help teachers to easily guide their students to investigate physical phenomena and to make questions and formulate scientific hypotheses. We will briefly describe the training methodology, giving some examples of the work produced by the teachers in their classrooms during our project, with comments and discussion

Lezioni stellari: un percorso didattico per la Scuola Secondaria di II grado

Il Dipartimento di Fisica dell’Università di Salerno si apre al mondo della scuola ormai da anni. Negli ultimi tempi, si stanno organizzando molte attività di divulgazione e orientamento: visite guidate e laboratori, il premio Caianiello, corsi di preparazione alle Olimpiadi della Fisica e, da due anni la Scuola Estiva di Fisica. Nell'ambito della Scuola Estiva di Fisica 2015, si sono svolti tre incontri dedicati all'astrofisica: un primo incontro è stato dedicato ad imparare “l’alfabeto” delle stelle; il secondo incontro è stato destinato alle osservazioni astronomiche; durante il terzo incontro sono state analizzate le immagini acquisite nel corso del secondo incontro. Gli studenti hanno potuto vedere le immagini originali "grezze" e le immagini di calibrazione Lo scopo dei tre incontri è stato accompagnare gli studenti attraverso la loro prima misura astronomica. In particolare, l'obiettivo è stato tracciare il diagramma colore-magnitudine di un ammasso stellare aperto

Lezioni stellari: un percorso didattico per la Scuola Secondaria di II grado

Il Dipartimento di Fisica dell’Università di Salerno si apre al mondo della scuola ormai da anni. Negli ultimi tempi, si stanno organizzando molte attività di divulgazione e orientamento: visite guidate e laboratori, il premio Caianiello, corsi di preparazione alle Olimpiadi della Fisica e, da due anni la Scuola Estiva di Fisica. Nell'ambito della Scuola Estiva di Fisica 2015, si sono svolti tre incontri dedicati all'astrofisica: un primo incontro è stato dedicato ad imparare “l’alfabeto” delle stelle; il secondo incontro è stato destinato alle osservazioni astronomiche; durante il terzo incontro sono state analizzate le immagini acquisite nel corso del secondo incontro. Gli studenti hanno potuto vedere le immagini originali "grezze" e le immagini di calibrazione Lo scopo dei tre incontri è stato accompagnare gli studenti attraverso la loro prima misura astronomica. In particolare, l'obiettivo è stato tracciare il diagramma colore-magnitudine di un ammasso stellare aperto

A Teaching Proposal: Mechanical Analog of an Over-damped Josephson Junction

An over-damped pendulum can be adopted as a mechanical analog of an over-damped Josephson Junction. The basic equations leading to the driving torque versus the time average of the angular frequency are studied. The mechanical analog can be used to provide additional insight into the current-voltage characteristics of over-damped Josephson Junctions

Mechanical analog of an over-damped Josephson junction

An over-damped pendulum can be adopted as a mechanical analogue of an over-damped Josephson junction (JJ). The basic equations leading to the driving torque versus the time average of the angular frequency are studied. The mechanical analogue can be used to provide additional insight into the current-voltage characteristics of over-damped JJs

Inquiry sugli effetti ottici nei templi di Paestum: una esperienza didattica.

Le figure da noi percepite sono sempre una esatta interpretazione della realtà fisica? Riportiamo l'esperienza didattica presso il "Liceo Matematico Gatto" (Agropoli, SA): nel percorso su ottica, luce e colore abbiamo analizzato la differenza fra effetti ottici (ottica geometrica) ed illusioni ottiche (la percezione). Entrambi portano ad una "visione" della realtà, comune a tutti gli osservatori, differente da ciò che essa è. Gli studenti hanno ricercato come nei templi greci della vicina Paestum siano state applicate correzioni a tali effetti: scalanatura, rastremazione, entasi, maggiore diametro delle colonne esterne. L'argomento, svolto con metodologia laboratoriale e anche con modalità di "flipped class", ha forte valenza interdisciplinare: coinvolge (oltre la fisica) biologia ---occhio e cervello---, filosofia ---la realtà è come sembra?---, matematica ---la serie di Fibonacci---, geometria, arte e beni culturali

Inquiry based teaching: An experience with THE TEMI E.U. project

With the aim of giving new skills to engage their students with exciting new resources and of supporting teachers in their work to implement IBSE (Inquiry Based Science Education) in their classrooms, at the universities of Milan and Salerno various didactical activities for high school teachers have been planned and implemented in the last years. In particular, the Physics Education Research Group of Milan, one of the 13 partners of the European project TEMI (Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated), has planned and organized a training session with a group of 34 high school teachers that have been held in Salerno. Teachers have been involved in directly making them experience the 5E inquiry methodology to be tested in their classes. Teachers have been engaged by a suitably chosen physics mystery and fostered to explore, to discover and find explanations of the mystery in order to practice scientific investigation. All the IBSE activities proposed had the main purpose of reducing the gap between standard high school practice and well-known education techniques, by offering concrete strategies and specific tools for physics teaching. In this work, we will briefly describe our training experience and outline teachers' practice in their classrooms

Brownian Motion and Simmetries: an Interdisciplinary Teaching Proposal

In this work we present an educational proposal for high school students based on Brownian motion, an interesting phenomenon, easily observable but not so simply explainable. Why introduce Brownian Motion into the students curriculum? Because of large educational potential into STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics): it links microscopic to macroscopic world, and allows integrating many disciplines. Starting from the Brownian motion’s historical aspects, we want to highlight its transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature: mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science and biology could be involved and treated choosing the required level of detail, and extends to social and economic phenomena. According to the new National Guidelines for the Italian high schools, which in turn take into account the strategies suggested by the EU for the construction of the " knowledge society ", [2] our work propose an “action-research” approach, including Mathematics, ICT and Physics laboratories, to teach and learn by discovering. In order to contribute to revitalize school curriculum and improve digital literacies, starting from historical Brown’s experience, beside some classical experiments, real or virtual, we propose a simple macroscopic model of chaotic motion, and a “random walk” simulation made by using the software “Geogebra”. Both experiences are easily implementable in a classroom activity. This proposal is addressed to teachers who want to build “learning that was less about acquiring, remembering, and repeating subject content, and more about active participation in scholarly ways of doing and being” [10