Modeling activities in the framework of an interdisciplinary subject Informatics in science and mathematics

Currently in Slovakia, there is a strong need to attract more students for their future career in IT or science and technology. The motivation towards these subjects is an important issue at all levels of education and isin the main focus of the national project IT academy. One of its goals at upper secondary level is the introduction of classes with focus on informatics where teaching informatics and science is strengthened a great deal. Except from extra lessons on informatics a new interdisciplinary subject Informatics in science and mathematics is designed. Its main goal is to show interesting problems that can be solved using informatics concepts. For the physics part, we have designed teaching and learning materials on the concept of modeling. Developing models in the physics research cannot be conducted without knowledge of coding in a programming environment. Our main goal is to show students a similar modeling approach on situations that are simple and understandable to them. Students proceed similar way as researchers do, i.e. they get a problem, develop a model, manipulate with it, test the model and improve it to get better correspondence with experimental results. The modeling is conducted in dynamical modeling software where variables are represented by icons that can be a first step to coding in professional programming environment. In the paper we introduce a set of modeling activities designed for the purpose of the presented teaching subject.