SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY EXPERIMENTS

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between scientific knowledge and literary skill. Following this purpose, we made an experiment with classes of secondary school. The main idea of the afternoon classes’ experiments was to link the humanities and natural sciences classes. For this project teachers worked together in a complementary and interdisciplinary way. It was shown that very different teaching disciplines can have the same objectives: discussions about the life and work of a scientist and how can write into literary publication to capture attention of the reader.
We proposed and used a model for reaching the aim of our project consisting in several phases. The work started with a discussion in the classroom about the scientist whose life and work will be studied. The next step was for documentation and the pupils had to get acquainted with the personality of the scientist. To do this they had to search in internet and scientific journals information concerning the life of the scientist, its collocation in the historical and geopolitical context of the time; they had to compare the old conditions of life and research, the available knowledge base, with the present ones; they had to find important discoveries related to the scientist under discussion that are still used in the present days; reading meetings and staging of tales related to the life and work of the scientist were organized. In a third phase the information found by individual or groups of pupils were diffused to all the classmates by using the interactive multimedia smart boards LIM. The aim was to identify the most significant facts related to the life and work of the scientist and to establish the scheme for writing a report. In the last phase the pupils reproduced an old studied experiment with the means available in the school laboratory. Then, they prepared a report with all the information and results acquired. In addition, finally they reorganized the report as an imaginary interview with the scientist for the first page of the newspapers or for a scientific publication.