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?”. […]
The article suggests an easily reproducible statistical procedure for searching natural phenomena for regularities. […]
The article is pertinent to a pluridisciplinary experience concerning the different meanings of the Italian word “tempo” which exact translation would be either “time” or “weather”. The experience has been conducted within a triennial program in the first class of a secondary school. […]
A 40 W bulb lamp lights up although a thick copper is shorting its terminals. This paradoxical situation may help to stimulate curiosity and induce a critical attitude towards the parameters that must be taken in account when analysing electrical phenomena. […]
In order to find the dielectric constant of an insulating fluid the authors measured the resonance frequency of a parallel plate capacitor that had the fluid as dielectric. The results show that the method is suitable but some improvements are needed to increase the experimental sensitivity. […]
A simple experiment for measuring the velocity of sound in air using two hollow metal cylinders, a microphone and a digital oscilloscope is described. Knowing the distance between microphone and cylinders the velocity of sound is easily computed by measuring the time interval between banging them together and the microphone’s reception of the sound. […]
On-line data acquisition systems have disclosed new possibilities for teaching physics laboratory. A cheap and easy apparatus, as the one here described, allows to easily perform interesting experiments or to re-design old experiments making them suitable for schools that have no laboratory, […]