Fabio Bevilacqua

New contents for new media: Pavia project physics

This hypermedial project deals with a historical and conceptual approach to physics. The “core” of the project is a certain number of “case studies”, namely problems or phenomena recounted together with their different interpretations. All case studies present two levels of investigation: the first level is devoted to high school students, the second level is devoted to university students and high school teachers. Our project is directed at a new and better understanding and appreciation of scientific culture.Our methodology is a historical methodology: teaching physics and the history of physics are fellow-subjects. We are not interested in adding the history of physics to teaching physics, as an optional subject: the history of physics is “inside” physics.Since textbooks usually give one and only one explanation of each physical phenomenon – the “true” explanation – we would like, on the contrary, to present the phenomena together with different interpretations that factually occurred in the history of physics. We offer four different approaches to the subject of the case study: “A. Phenomena”, “B. Textbooks”, “C. History” and “D. Maps”.The basic unit of the hypermedia is the presentation , namely a coherent set of information endowed with a definite and complete meaning. From the media point of view, a presentation consists of pictures and/or animations, key-words and/or key-sentences and a speaker explanation. Each approach consists of a certain number of “presentations”.