Since 1971 EEC is giving indications to the member States on the adoption of increasingly unified metric units, to which each State responded by promulgating appropriate laws. After a short history of the S.I., this article comments on the Italian laws and the public perception of the problem and gives information about the penalties and risks connected with using the improper units. […]
About one hundred physics textbooks have been examined in this article to research the answer given to a simple question of hydrostatics shown in fig. 1. The number of wrong answers turned out to be surprisingly high. […]
The concept of pressure should be easy to understand; despite that, I’ve found frequent misunderstandings in students, teachers, and books. Is this quantity related to interaction or to the state of a system? Is it a vector, or scalar (or tensor) quantity? […]
During the last decade Educational Research in many countries of the world has been dealing with the question of the lack of participation of girls in science education, especially in physical and technological sciences. This article reviews the most the issues, […]
At the Cottolengo School in Torino (Italy) many pupils are foreigners and-or suffer a disability. We implemented a set of “play booths” with the purpose of motivating and encouraging the pupils’ interest in science and promoting aggregation and cultural integration […]
Piekara’s Chair is a macroscopic, classical model useful for explaining several atomic physics concepts and phenomena such as energy levels, spontaneous and stimulated emission, absorption and Boltzmann statistics. In this article the Model is described and possible classroom uses are suggested. […]
This article analyses notorious problems concerning Newlon’s third law against the historical background. A proposal is made to reformulate this law by substituting the term ‘interaction’ far ‘action’ and ‘reaction’. […]
While learning Relativity in high school requires the pupils to think in ways that are not supported by their common reasoning, the teachers usually think that its understanding requires removing everyday experience. The paper describes a discussion in wich the author, […]