Abstract:

As part of the activities developed in the OCRA (Outreach Cosmic Ray Activities) project, coordinated at a national level by INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, laboratory teaching experiences are proposed to the school world to discover the subject of astroparticles and, through them, to explore the universe that surrounds us. The activities proposed by OCRA are aimed at building bridges of collaboration between the school, the university and the world of research both through paths dedicated to teachers and through activities designed for students.

In this article we will describe an educational laboratory, proposed during a science festival, that focused on the Universe, with particular attention to the solar system and the planet Earth.

By using real data collected with a cosmic ray telescope in real time during the laboratory, concepts of physics, science, mathematics, and computer science were introduced. The students were taken on a journey through out our Universe to discover astroparticles and all the information that they bring us from deep space.

The narrative was developed into a multi-voiced path centered on the constant interaction between researchers and students. A book describing the Universe and Space whit a lot of eye-catching photos and designs, some slides show that accompanied it, the telescope and an app that allowed students to access the telescope data in first person were the didactic tools of this constructivist approach to knowledge.

The scientific path was oriented to describe the discoveries and models both in a diachronic and synchronic key and was enriched with many ideas created by the continuous questions and curiosities of the students. They were extremely fascinated by what is mysterious and unknown and therefore they were captured in this journey that lasted a whole morning and led them to discover how the disciplines studied at school are the base for the advancement of scientific research, how much mathematics is hidden in computer programming, data processing and geometric reconstruction of models and how physics, thanks to all the information obtained from the various areas of knowledge, is able to describe and model all the observations, to represent how our Universe is constituted.

Keywords:

Astroparticles, cosmic ray telescope, constructivism, laboratory, Universe.