Un itinerario didattico introduttivo all’insegnamento dell’ottica

We present a recently developed project for teaching optics to 14-15 year old students. Pointing out some shortcomings of the traditional approaches, we take into account the students’ common sense “preconceptions” investigated in various inquiries. The teaching pattern we propose is rooted in everyday experience and the aim is to answer immediately questions such as: “how can we see what we see?”. In order to do this we think that a course in optics should start with a qualitative treatment of the difference between sources and light scattering objects and with a clear presentation of the working of the human eye. Then the course may follow more traditional lines.