The project involves teachers and students of two levels of school, primary and higher secondary in activities which deepen physics subjects. This initiative is aimed at stimulating students of secondary school in studying science, by making them conceiving, planning and realizing a number of experiences to guide and assist peers and younger pupils in learning. The point at issue is to make students of both levels discovering together the physical phenomenon which regulate the everyday life. Teen-aged students are asked to play the role of tutors, in order to show to the youngest physics phenomena by means of simple and telling experiments. The primary pupils are leaded by their teachers to discover and experience How an object works
, whether it is a common object or a didactic object expressly created for the occasion. The main project's steps are: a) separate parallel training sessions for primary pupils and teachers as well as for secondary students in order to prepare them for the common activities on a chosen subject; b) organisation of learning paths in which older students lead their younger colleagues through experimental activities to discover physic phenomena in a chosen subject. Some of the didactic objects have been included in the travelling exhibition, promoted by the Science Center of Torino.
The pedagogical sequence is organised in a sort of learning path
consisting of six working groups-tables each of them dealing with a different aspect related to the physics subject treated, which is illustrated by a couple of (higher secondary school) students as tutors. Example of working groups are:
Urloscopio. Listening and display
The tools lets see how the ear gains the sounds: we can observe, as the sonorous waves produced by our voice that they pass in the pipe, through following compressions and decompression of the air they bump the membrane represented by the cloth plasticized that waving lets skip about impending sand. You can be discovered in over that anymore the issued sound is acute and the grains of sand wave anymore.
How does the light travel? The direction of rays of light travel in a direct line from the source to the illuminated object. Tools: paperboard tubes with a plumb-line.
How we see the images? The eye's elements: pupil, retina, crystalline lens, rods, cones.
Reflection of light, the inclination of incident ray, absorption, diffusion and reflection of light. The experiments: Different kind of mirrors: rough, smooth, opaque, concave,convex, reflections multiple.
In the cylindrical anamorphosis a painting or drawing that is distorted becomes recognizable when viewed with a cylindrical mirror placed upon the picture in order to reveal the distorted surface.
You can play this movie.