The debate on the correctness of the 1919 eclipse experiment is still in progress. This paper aims to contribute by analyzing the available data on the instruments, the achievable accuracy versus what would have been necessary and some experimental details not currently available in the relevant literature. […]
This paper aims at clarifying what education in science may mean in the real context of classroom activities. In particular the meaning of education in physics will be illustrated by looking at the development of concepts and methods within a perspective of continuity in the teaching of science at the level of compulsory education, […]
Textbooks are the result of the author’s specific scientific, epistemological, educational choices. Original memories can help teachers and students to elicit the roots of the authors’ choices and their peculiarities with respect to other possible choices. The issue is discussed by re-constructing the historical-epistemological roots of the most popular approaches to teaching Special Relativity through a careful analysis of the original papers by Einstein and Minkowski. […]
The paper reports the main results of an experience in teaching Special Relativity to 17-18 year old students of a Scientific Lyceum. The course stressed in depth understanding of crucial concepts and mastering content knowledge from epistemological and cultural perspectives. The results show that involving students in high cultural challenges is possible and suggest that their dislike of physics might be due not to its intrinsic difficulty but to the perception that the difficulty is not repaid by what it usually offers. […]
This article describes two quantitative experiments about electromagnetic phenomena performed with an appropriate interface board connected to a computer on-line […]
A series of three simple experimental activities with bycicle lamps allows a determination of the temperature of the filament, an evaluation of the light emission of the lamp. and an examination of the law for the dependence of the illumination on the distance from the source, […]
Experimental study on the utilization of solar energy: from photosynthesis to the fabrication of a solar panel. […]