Marcella Giulia Lorenzi

Using a Sociocultural Approach in Teaching Astronomy Concepts with Children of Primary School

This chapter describes the use of a social collaborative learning approach to teach astronomical concepts. We used a repeated measure design to test the effectiveness of a teaching intervention aimed at improving basic concepts of Astronomy. Results show that children after the didactical experience were able to give a detailed explanation of the acquired knowledge. These results suggest that the approach adopted is fruitful and helps children to learn and understand scientific concepts, revisiting their pre-existing knowledge, often influenced by naive explanations.

E = mc2: A VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA TO VISUALIZE RELATIVITY

In the framework of Digital Art applied to Scientific Visualization we have realized a short video together with an interactive multimedia aimed at visualizing and diffusing the main concepts of Special Relativity. This note makes a short presentation of it.