Resumo Este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar aproximações teóricas entre características da técnica de mapeamento conceitual e aspectos da elaboração de conhecimento científico na História da Ciência. Tais aproximações foram exemplificadas por intermédio da construção e análise de um mapa conceitual sobre como, historicamente, o conhecimento foi desenvolvido de forma a resultar na Lei da Inércia. Como conclusão, aspectos estruturais dos mapas conceituais (proposições, estrutura bidimensional, ligações cruzadas, etc.) foram relacionados à provisoriedade do conhecimento científico, à não linearidade e à influência do contexto histórico e social na construção do conhecimento, entre outros aspectos, compatíveis com uma concepção de ciência como empreendimento humano. Tais relações são apresentadas em um quadro síntese, que pode subsidiar professores e pesquisadores da área de Ensino de Ciências a implementar ações educativas que adotem mapas conceituais em contextos em que a História da Ciência seja utilizada.
Fractals are geometric objects used to describe irregular shapes that have a fractional dimension and commonly appear in nature. Although several proposals for the study of perfect fractals at the basic level are present in the literature, only few proposals for the study of real fractals exist, which does not seem reasonable considering the wealth of the theme and its potentiality as an interdisciplinary topic. In this text, we present a simple and easily assimilable procedure to calculate the fractal dimension of any two-dimensional object. It only demands a computer with the free software ImageJ installed. This procedure is easily understandable, considering the basic school curriculum, and easily usable in a variety of school settings.
We present an educational game for teaching physics, Spies. The game is based on the popular boardgame Codenames. It is useful as a didactic tool to promote and improve student engagement. Spies is practical, fast and requires very little physical resources, which makes it ideal for high school teaching and viable in most diverse school realities.iopscience.org/ped 3 A good description of the game may be found at https:// boardgamegeek.
Although it originates from the ancient Greeks, optics still arouses a lot of scientific interest, mainly due to the technological innovation associated with it. One of its most interesting applications is related to optical metrology and the characterization of materials through optical techniques. While some of these processes can be explained in a simplified way using a few of the fundamental principles of physics, there are hardly any proposals whose objective is to discuss this topic at a basic level. Accordingly, we present a low-cost experiment that allows the characterization of surface roughness using the fractal dimension of the speckle pattern associated with the light scattered by a surface. For simplicity, the entire activity is adaptable to the most diverse school situations. Moreover, it allows the discussion of many fundamental physics concepts and provides students with an experience similar to that experienced by scientists.
We propose an experimental activity in order to develop a mathematical model that relates step length and walking speed of human beings. We employ two well-known physics teaching softwares, namely, Tracker to carry out the video analysis and LibreOffice/Calc to obtain graphs, trend lines and equations. The predictions of our model are compared with those of similar models present in the literature. This activity is simple, practical and viable in the most diverse school circumstances, and it has been applied on several occasions in high school lectures at our institute. We have found that it can be, in many ways, useful in physics teaching.
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