This paper aims to introduce the initiative "Escola Sirius para Professores do Ensino Médio" (ESPEM, Sirius School for High School Teachers) hosted by the "Centro Nacional de Pesquisa em Energia e Materiais" (CNPEM, Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials) and supported by the Sociedade Brasileira de Física (SBF,…

Harmful plastic debris found on beaches and in the oceans are not limited to drinking straws or bags. There are several synthetic organic polymers that can be used to make different kinds of plastic materials and have resulted in billions of tons of waste that can reach the aquatic biome and are harmful to freshwater and marine communities as well…

Radon is a dangerous radioactive gas that is always present in the environment. It is important that students and society in general are aware of radon as a health hazard. This study describes a simple experiment to measure the variations of radon gas concentration outdoors. We compared the concentration of radon gas in the environment in dry and…

Many researches show that students have difficulties in understanding graphics in kinematics. Some authors argue that we can use different instructional strategies to reduce these difficulties. Based on these studies, we developed and applied a didactic sequence using educational robotics to teach graphic analysis in movements in a dimension with…

Research on problem-solving strategies has been conducted since the 1940s. Experts and novices use different strategies in problem solving; the main difference is in the familiarity with which they face new problems. For multiple-choice problems, an analysis of distractors can provide possible clues about the resolution processes developed by…

This work shows the production steps of two optical fibre sensing setups which were specially designed for the activities of the 2018 Photonics Lab Open Day realized at the Federal University of Technology-Paraná in Brazil as a celebration of the first International Day of Light (16 May). The systems are based on the sensing properties of fibre…

In Brazil, environmental topics in teacher education programmes have largely been addressed and explored by the field of research in Environmental Education and subsidized by legislative and normative instruments. Nevertheless, the difficulties in articulating environmental topics within some areas of knowledge compromise their integration in…

The role of peer and teacher mediation in discussions about two original scientific texts in the final year of high school in Brazil is explored in this study. A text by James C. Maxwell, deals with the characterisation of light as an electromagnetic phenomenon, and refers to the continuous manner of the distribution of energy by radiation in…

The COVID-19 Pandemic interrupted university activities at the beginning of the first semester of 2020, forcing the academic community to reinvent itself to meet the determinations of social isolation. The use of assistive technologies such as information and communication technologies has never been more welcome. However, for a college student…

This paper presents the creation of an educational resource using the camera of a mobile phone and video analysis software. The movie recorded is part of a daily context: an airplane's take-off. This work shows a way to introduce information and communication technologies (ICT) and digital educational resources (DER) as tools to teach and…

Ciênsação, an open online repository for hands-on experiments, has been developed to convince teachers in Latin America that science is best experienced first hand. Permitting students to experiment autonomously in small groups can be a challenging endeavour for educators in these countries. We analyse the reasons that cause hesitation of teachers…

The necessity to teach experimental physics in the pandemic period motivated the development of practices in which students may take measurements with instruments constructed by themselves. In this article, we present an experimental practice to approach Newton's law of cooling with a thermoscope (the earliest device for detecting changes in…

Ionizing radiation one of modern physics experimental teaching in colleges and high school can be easily implemented today due to low coasts of detectors and also electronic circuits and data acquisition interfaces. First it is interesting to show to young's students what is ionizing radiation and from where they appears near ground level? How it…

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…

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…