Duration:

A laboratory session of three hours per group of students.

Maximum number of students:

Maximum number of students per group in the Experimenta Room is of 16. The practices are developed in pairs. All the students can carry out the same practice simultaneously and have at their disposal the same experimental device.

Objective of the Sessions:

The objective of the session is double. On the one hand it aims to carry out a coordinated work between a group of batxiller (Spanish upper secondary school) teachers and university professors, so that they plan the teaching of the mechanics and optics topics (students of 1st and 2nd courses of batxiller respectively), and a set of experiences of laboratory appropriate and adapted to its contents. On the other hand, it aims to motivate batxiller students towards the experimental work, carrying out some experiences that contribute to improve the understanding of fundamental concepts, taking advantage of the new equipment of the Physics Room Experimenta. The work sessions provide the chance of observing the phenomena and of managing the experimental devices, with the appropriate simplifications. Furthermore, they allow for discussing the explanation of such phenomena in relation to the theoretical contents studied in class.

Programme of the experimental session:

The work session in the laboratory includes, in the first part, an introductive explanation carried out by professors. This explanation completes with a historical contextualisation, references to applications that come from the explained principles, computer simulations or other simple experimental demonstrations that help to notice the importance of said phenomena in many everyday situations or technological applications.

In the second part of the session, the students distribute in pairs and carry out by themselves the experiences, following a simplified guide that allow them for understand the phenomena, as well as the predictive power of the physical model that explains that. All the pairs use the same experimental devices. The students are supervised and helped by professors of the faculty as well as their professor.

The scripts are adapted to the level of the students and often they start with an open part that allow them for making a clearer idea of the phenomenon. It is guided qualitative observations that allow for a better understanding of the practice before proceeding to the experimental measuring and to the quantitative analysis. The workflow of the practices is thought so that the data analysis and a good part of the conclusions are carried out in the same session.