"DIVERTIESPERIMENTI": EXHIBITS AND ACTIVITIES TO HELP TEACHING SCIENCE

In order to encourage a change in the way science is taught, the Department of Physics at University of Salerno has opened within its walls a mini Science Center, named "Divertiesperimenti" ("Fun-Experiments"). We will describe the activities offered to high-school students and teachers by means of "Divertiesperimenti": we researched how to support middle and high school teachers of math and science to incorporate hands-on and inquiry experiences into their classrooms, since the 2002. As well known, "learning by doing" is an essential educational strategy, especially for scientific disciplines, but unfortunately only a few percentage of the students has the opportunity to experience science in an interactive way in their classroom. Our small exhibit's collection, based on the model of the San Francisco's Exploratorium, provides learners with opportunities to directly observe and manipulate many natural phenomena, guided by university experts. The core of the activities is the "Inquiry-based learning": starting from the exploration by hands-on exhibits, learners are guided to activate skills to do in-depth scientific inquiry. Our collection is far from being a professional science center, but its strength relies in the fact that, being in the rooms of the Physics Department, school students and teachers could stretch out their hands and touch even the research instruments. With respect to an usual science center, people can more easily extend the inquiry from empirical starting clues to some advanced research topics in modern physics (superconductivity, astrophysics and more in general quantum physics).