As a final project for our electronic instrumentation practical course, students were challenged to build their own colorimeter to measure their own biochemical reaction, requiring them to apply all recently acquired theoretical knowledge and practical skills. They developed their electronic circuit on our recently developed Advanced Learning Platform for Analog Circuits and Automation, which...
This paper describes the work of design, testing and evaluation of the effectiveness of a pilot Teaching-Learning Sequence on quantum mechanics presented to high school students and teachers. The experimentation consisted of 10 Zoom meetings, between October 2021 and January 2022. At the end of the first nine meetings, each student was given a form aimed at bringing out the reasoning used, and...
While laboratory courses are an integral part of physics studies aiming a huge variety of learning objectives, research has shown that typical lab courses do not reach the desired goals. While diverse approaches by lab instructors and researchers try to increase the efficiency of lab courses, the experimental tasks remain the key elements of each lab. As it gets more and more difficult to keep...
A series of semi-structured demonstration interviews about the basic phenomena of wave optics were conducted with Croatian high school students after their regular school instruction on this topic. We analyze the identified students’ difficulties with the interference and diffraction of light on double-slit, single-slit and optical grating from the knowledge-in-pieces perspective.
In this article we present STEM-related master level education. Here we go through an example on the way how to teach risk of damage connected to helicopter winching. We were teaching this case study through the method called group-based learning. Moreover we observed skill and reasoning ability development due the early research methodological education during the two last years of master...
Climate change is the greatest threat to mankind and the biosphere. It is essential to understand how to deal with this problem, discover its causal mechanisms and find the best way to narrate it. The literature has shown that using a probabilistic risk-based approach does not allow for a full understanding of the causal mechanisms linked to one's actions and leads to inaction on climate...
The modern world is a very data-driven place, bristling with repositories of openly available information, yet these resources are seldom used in education below university levels. In this talk we present the case for secondary school level use of open, authentic “real world” data and easily accessible programming as cross-disciplinary tools for advancing the students' scientific literacy and...
This research project aims at developing learning material for teaching particle physics with Feynman diagrams to high school students. We take a design-based research approach to find possible educational uses for Feynman diagrams to be beneficial in the learning about particle physics. We incorporate these uses into the learning material with design principles derived from multimedia...
As a part of a larger project, printed slits and optical gratings were developed for students’ high school experiments in wave optics: interference on a double slit and optical grating and diffraction on a single slit. These printed single and double slits are very cheap and easily accessible for teachers. The patterns they produce show clear differences between single slit diffraction and...
Digital image processing is a very useful method to analyse photographs and videos. The idea behind the image investigation is to recognize different shapes and colours. In our study we analyse videos of free fall and projectile motion by software written in Python programming language employing OpenCV libraries.
We designed and tested a personalized home-kit that was distributed to students in a Physics Education course during the pandemic as part of the COSID-20 project. A goal of the design of the kit was to be inexpensive enough to be attractive to schools and universities: a collaboration with a local startup has proven very valuable in this sense. In this work we will present our kit, which we...
Physics from the lab and taught to students are from two different worlds. This is even more pronounced as scientists often focus on working in the laboratories, forgetting to communicate their results to the public. Here we show how, by involving students in research projects, one can bring these two worlds closer together.
We present two quantitative low-cost experiments aimed at introducing students to quantum physics from a phenomenological point of view. These experiments could be used to discuss quantum measurements and the collapse of the wave-function, analysing the light transmission by 3 polaroids, and using the latter to set-up a quantum eraser. The experiments were tested with master students in...
In this presentation, I will first describe the process of our laboratory course transformation at the University of Potsdam and show exemplary activities to foster students’ acquisition of scientific skills. In the second part of the talk, I will describe how we have adapted the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) to the German context and set...
Nature of Science is featured in all science curricula. However, science in schools typically only features examples from the early 1900s. Often, those examples no longer reflect contemporary scientific practices. Meanwhile, modern discoveries, such as the Higgs boson discovery in 2012, provide a prime example of science in the making and a great opportunity to discuss the Nature of Science....
The work's objective is to identify, from the perspective of the high school student, the relationship between applied mathematics and tangible computation for the understanding of physical phenomena, based on the semiotic model, a principle of construction and reconstruction that articulates the representation and interpretation of physical phenomena. via computer. The study is qualitative...
This study compares the views of high-school teachers, physics educators at the university level, and physics education researchers from different countries, about the key concepts to be used in teaching quantum physics in secondary education and their illustrations. We analyzed responses to a Delphi study prompted by the QTEdu group, in the attempt to portray the illustrations for each key...
In this contribution, we present the results of one bachelor and one master theses both devoted to the teaching of special relativity at an upper-secondary or intro-university level in the Czech Republic. We compare the test results of the grammar-school students in the school years 1976/1977 and 2021/2022, which are close to average and very similar in both cases, so the level of...
This contribution aims to introduce research on the attitudes of upper secondary school students to experiments in physics lessons. The research instrument has three logical parts – the metadata about respondents is the first one. The second part is focused on describing the current state regarding experimental work in physics lessons at upper secondary schools. In the third part, respondents...
To better align assessment and learning goals for practical work, without increasing the teacher’s workload, we developed the scientific graphic organizer (SGO). The SGO can be considered a pre-structured but simplified lab journal that in many cases allows to replace the practical’s worksheet as well as students’ written report. We elaborate on the educational value of the SGO, discuss its...
We present two different experiments aimed at supporting the understanding of surface phenomena. Set-ups are a low budget. Materials and experimental apparatuses are available even in ordinary school didactic laboratories. In the first experiment, we use, as experimental apparatus, a simplified custom-built version of the well-known Du Noüy ring. It allows us to measure the surface tension of...
We report the results of an action-research activity conducted in the framework of the in-service teacher training programme CoLLABORA, developed at the University of Padova between 2018 and 2020. During the programme, teachers were encouraged to identify a problem relevant to their context and to formulate a research question as a guide for the design of new laboratory activities. Here we...
The availability of infra-red (IR) cameras changes the way we teach many topics: energy, thermodynamics, electricity, optics, and modern physics. As an IR camera is a complex device that functions based on the physics beyond the introductory level, in order to fully use its pedagogical potential, we need to integrate it into an introductory physics course without compromising course coherence...
The SmartPhysics project involved two higher education institutions, one in Italy and one in the US, with the aim of exploring the use of smartphones to perform laboratory experiments in introductory physics courses at university. Here we present and discuss two experiments that were tested during the project: the ‘pendulum’ experiment, consisting in the measurement of g using a pendulum and a...
Abstract. We will present the results of an analysis of Dutch secondary school students’ and teachers’ perceptions of Quantum Physics (QP) in comparison to their perception of Classical Physics. First, data on teachers’ perception of QP teaching and their students’ understanding of QP were collected. Secondly, we analyzed students’ self-efficacy concerning the subject of QP and related this to...
One amazing characteristics of quantum algorithms is how they can deliver results with 100% certainty despite their structure are based on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. These types of algorithm require a different way of thinking and sets a challenge for science educators. A routine to emulate quantum cryptography protocols for high school students, is proposed in this...
