Thematic Area: Culture, Society, Education and information

Oral presentation

Abstract

Physics is a natural science, which studies fundamental properties of the world around us. Any physics investigation involves so called scientific method, which obligatorily includes a stage of experimentation. It means that teaching physics must also include this stage since it more or less copies the scientific method. So, a teacher of physics, embarking on a new chapter, must begin with a demonstration experiments, revealing the main signs of a phenomena under study. Otherwise, the teaching of physics transforms into permanent monotonous and boring speech delivered by the teacher on the subject.  Exactly this is the situation the Mozambican high school is dealing with, regarding the teaching physics. The experimentation is almost totally absent at the classes of physics. And what is interesting, this way of teaching physics is called here the theoretical method of teaching.  There are multiple reasons for the absence of experimentation at schools, but it’s obvious that the main reasons are the lack of laboratories of physics and necessary equipment and materials to carry out the experimentation. What is even worse, the situation influences the state of mind of the teachers. They become disinterested, unmotivated, lazy and passive, transforming the classes of physics into tedious and monotonous one actor shows. In order to investigate how to raise the interest and motivation of the future teachers of physics to perform the experiments the authors decided to execute a particular study around the project-based learning. For the purpose was chosen a group of fifteen third year students of the Eduardo Mondlane University, Science Faculty, Department of Physics, and Physics Educational Orientation. These students attended the course of Didactics of Physics, whose principal lecturer was one of the co-authors of this presentation, and for the purpose of final examination each one of them received a three months task to prepare a project for an experiment in physics with a determined title from any material at their disposal. They have just returned their projects and the results of its analyses represent this presentation.

Key words: Physics, project, experimentation, school