Abstract:

Contemporary society is experiencing changes in the world of work, school and research with surprising speed. It is a fluid, constantly evolving society that confronts schools with challenges as fascinating as they are complex.

Therefore the role of educational institutions becomes fundamental to help students to choose what their future work and life will be. High schools have the arduous task of advising and guiding students towards future university choices. In this regard, collaboration of universities and research institutions becomes essential for students in order to make constructive experiences in a laboratory in different fields from which they will choose in their orientation.

In our paper we will present an activity developed within the project “Mathematical High School” of the Department of Mathematics of the University of Salerno (Italy) that aims to develop transdisciplinary themes where maths is the cultural glue between the various fields of knowledge.

In collaboration with the Napoli Unit of Istituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare (INFN) it has been developed a laboratory where students work as physics researchers.

The activities have been carried out in groups with the learning-by-doing methodological approach in which the MHS students experimented the activity of astroparticle physics researcher.

The INFN researcher activities are based on the data collected by the Cosmic Ray Cube (CRC), a cosmic muon detector developed at LNGS (Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso). The CRC allows to identify the trajectory of a cosmic muon thanks to the lighting of bright LEDs. Data are registered by a dedicated software. Students studied the cosmic muon flux as a function of the muon trajectory inclination and compared the results with the expected model. Moreover, using electronic spread sheets and starting from the CRC data saved in hexadecimal format, they learned to decode them and reconstruct the muon trajectory in 2 and 3-dimensions. Students followed all steps of a scientific experiment, from data taking to recovering information from data and understood that mathematics is fundamental in a scientific analysis.

Due to the COVID-19 and its lock-down, some activities have been modified and the data analysis has been carried out remotely on online platforms. So that, students also experienced how research centres all over the world share their information to boost research.

The collaboration between teachers and researchers allowed students to observe the different methodological approach to the issues: on the one hand the historical contextualization of the phenomena studied, the theoretical physical description of the collected data, on the other the use of theoretical knowledge to "search for answers", to find connections between the data with the theoretical justification.

Students found the course effective and exciting because they were asked to search for answers and analyse "raw" data thanks to the tools offered by new technologies.

Students were the protagonists of the activity, involved in all the steps towards the results with the possibility to allow them to use the most innovative technological tools as in the modern astroparticle physics experiment, and in a constructivist vision of laboratory didactics. This highly innovative approach has determined effectiveness in the didactical relapse, as can be seen also from the reports compiled by the students and from the interviews carried out during the activities.

Keywords:

Learning-by-doing, mathematics, astroparticle physics, researcher.