Experimento virtual interativo : o ensino da Teoria da Relatividade em uma educação STEM

Abstract

The Brazilian education system is on the verge of collapse: young people do not want to pursue a career in teaching; many do not even think about going to university; teachers are increasingly undervalued, not only in terms of salary, but also in terms of respect and recognition; the physical structure of schools is inadequate; the initial and continuing training of teachers needs to be rethought; and countless other aspects. Other problems arise if we limit ourselves to basic education, and even more so if we deal only with the teaching of science and/or physics. Inadequate scientific education results in a population that is not scientifically and technologically literate, in which they have not developed the skills and abilities to be active in society, such as a critical sense and an investigative spirit, which will lead them to believe any words uttered by people who only want to manipulate and control the less favored social masses. STEM Education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) has emerged as an option for an educational, political, economic, social and cultural reform of society as a whole, aimed at educating students for today and for the future, without forgetting the aspects of the past, both in terms of conceptual training and critical training for students to observe and act in the world in which they live, thus forming competencies and skills for contemporaneity. STEM Education seeks to address the crisis in science education, to break with traditional teaching, and to increase young people's interest in STEM careers by integrating these four major areas, which are considered crucial for the professions of the future and for the integral formation of the human being. In the classroom, STEM Education seeks to make students construct their own learning, in which active teaching strategies are a great ally, as well as the practice of scientific experimentation, the approach to the history, philosophy, sociology and epistemology of science, and the use of digital information and communication technologies. To this end, the general objective of our research is to present contributions, based on STEM Education, to the teaching of physics to high school students through the educational product: Experimento Virtual Interativo (EVI). To achieve this goal, we intend to: i. Develop the EVI of the historical Michelson and Morley interferometer experiment; ii. Apply the EVI within a sequence of activities for teaching the theory of relativity, using active teaching strategies, in the subject of Physics in a 3rd year high school class at Colégio Marista Santo Antônio; iii. To evaluate the effectiveness of EVI as a powerful teaching tool; iv. To present the contributions of the EVI to the teaching of physics in secondary schools. Thus, an educational product has been developed based on interactive videos and movies, which are becoming increasingly popular on streaming services. The EVI is not an experimental video in which the viewer watches passively, but it allows the interactor to make decisions that directly affect the constructed experiment, allowing the choice of certain materials and the verification of different results. The educational product therefore consists of material that explains the development of EVI in detail, as well as a step-by-step guide on how to create interactive videos to be made available on YouTube. The EVI experiment is the Michelson and Morley Interferometer, an experimental apparatus of unparalleled importance in physics, which makes it possible to discuss Aristotle's physics, classical physics, and modern and contemporary physics with the theory of relativity, showing students how scientific knowledge has been developed over the years by countless scientists and researchers. In this way, a series of activities with ten sessions was applied to students at a 3rd year high school class in a private school in the municipality of Sinop (Mato Grosso/Brazil). Our research is qualitative, applied in nature, with descriptive research objectives, and is a case study in which the data were analyzed using discourse analysis. The results indicate that EVI is a powerful material to be used by teachers in the classroom; as well as, the sequence of activities was able to provide the development of various skills and abilities beyond the curricular content, so that students were motivated to study physics and received an integral human formation to make important decisions in society. Therefore, this master’s research has managed to bring together different topics that converge in a sequence of activities in which our educational product is applied, allowing teachers and researchers to replicate the activities developed, and also collaborate with the dissemination of interactive videos for teaching science, providing yet another tool at the disposal of the teacher.