Abstract:

Sketching the portrait of a leading scientist in the history of Italian physics through a podcast: this is the challenge that INFN, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, launched to high school students through the contest called "Audioritratti di scienza” (“Audio-portraits of science”).

The aim of the project was to bring students closer to the history of physics, by working on the podcast and by consulting the videos of the Mediateca INFN, a rich archive of historical audiovisual material about Italian research in fundamental physics. Students were, indeed, asked to work in small groups to create a 5 minutes podcast, inspired by the life and scientific activity of a great scientist, starting from the material in the INFN Mediateca. The prize of the contest was a trip to INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories, the largest underground facility devoted to astroparticle physics in Europe, and to get their podcasts published as an official INFN podcast series called “Radici” (in English, “roots”) and advertised on INFN social media channels.

To help the students in the preparation and development of the podcast, four live events were held on INFN YouTube channel about the history of elementary particles, Higgs boson, gravitational waves, and black holes. The guests of the events were leading scientists in these fields, and their role was to go through the milestones in the history of these areas of research. The live events were developed around some polls answered by the students and around videos taken from “La Mediateca INFN”.

Overall, the videos got around 10,500 views and around 500 students, organised in 130 teams, from all over Italy submitted their podcasts. At the end of the contest a questionnaire was proposed to students to evaluate the project, that was overall found useful and interesting by the students.

Keywords:

Education, contest, podcast, physics, history.