New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

New Trends in Physics Teaching IV
An experience in the teaching of energy in Italy
A. BASTAI PRAT.
ENERGY, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
In recent years Italian physics teachers have taken a great interest in ‘Science and Society’ themes,
particularly in that of energy. This interest, however, has rarely given birth to systematic teaching.
This is due mainly to the structure of our schools, which is in principle very rigid and centralized,
with programmes and timetables, fixed at the national level, which, at least, for upper secondary
schools, are very old, obsolete and give little time for science teaching. However, Italy is a country
of individualists, and what is not allowed in principle is often done in fact. So, many teachers,
driven by their students’ requests or by their own feeling of the importance of the matter, have
introduced this theme into their courses more or less officially.
It would be very difficult to give an overall view of these attempts, since they have been on
small scale, without comparing the results. For instance, in Torino students from one school
collected data on energy consumption from a sample of over 3,000 families, constructing data
tables and analyzing them with a computer [ 11 ; in other schools students designed and built
solar panels on the roof of the building, and in a country school they even built a working
digestor to produce energy from organic wastes [ 21.
Here I shall describe what our own group - an informal group of university and secondary
school teachers - has done in recent years. Interest in our experience, if any, may lie in the fact
that we tried to connect together various experiences and to make the results available to a larger
audience, through printed commercial materials, informal distribution of preliminary versions
through professional associations, in-service teacher training courses, and so on.
THE ENERGY PROBLEM: AN HISTORICAL APPROACH
Our interest in the energy problem began in the period when some of us [3] were working on the
Italian adaptation of the Project Physics Course. In this course, the energy concept is introduced
and immediately followed by a discussion of the steam engine and its impact on the industrial
revolution; this in turn leads to the discussion of the equivalence between heat and work.
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