“The Elegance of Quantum Mechanics”: a didactic path for high school

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes the work of design, testing and evaluation of the effectiveness of a pilot teaching-learning sequence on Quantum Mechanics (QM) presented to high school students and teachers. The aim is to construct a path starting from the discussion of real experiments to get to the mathematical basic structure of QM, and to test whether this path can be effectively proposed at high school level. The experimentation consisted of 10 Zoom meetings, between October 2021 and January 2022. At the end of each of the first nine meetings, each student was given a form aimed at bringing out the reasoning used, and the level of understanding achieved. At the end of the course a satisfaction survey was also given. The effectiveness of the activity was assessed by means of all homework and interviews with 13 students and 6 teachers.