Creating a quantum awareness in lower secondary science education

Quantum Education these days tends to start in upper secondary education or even in higher education (Krijtenburg-Lewerissa, Pol, Brinkman & Van Joolingen, 2017). The topic of quantum is therefore often only accessible to students interested in physics. However, to increase an interest in physics and to make everyone aware of the importance of quantum physics in our daily lives, it is important that children from a primary school age and upwards learn what quantum is or that it even exists (Popkova et al., 2023). There are initiatives that have young children encounter modern physics phenomena by playing games or by doing practical exercises that make them think (e.g. Kersting & Steier, 2018 ). Regular teaching materials do not include quantum related subjects. Especially in the Netherlands, teaching
materials often stem from years of careful consideration on what physics topics to teach or what science topics to teach either in primary school or secondary education.
We have begun a teacher design team (TDT) to design experiments and additions to existing topics generally taught in lower secondary education, to make younger students aware of quantum physics. They do not actually learn what quantum physics is, but simply the fact that it exists is enough. Like we all know that electricity exists and we do not all study it, but we know it is vital in our lives. We aim to achieve that children from a young age know that quantum exists and that it plays a role in our daily lives. To achieve this we have drawn up design principles for the materials to be created, based on conceptual change in science (Vosniadou et al., 2001) that help ensure we reach our goal.
Workshop
In this workshop we will introduce our method and design principles that we used to make add-on materials teachers can use in their lower secondary classrooms. We present the add-on physics materials we made and we ask of the participants to provide feedback on these materials. Next, using our design principles and inspired by the materials already there, we ask them to team up and come up with new ideas for materials that could add a quantum understanding to daily-life science and practice. With these new ideas the TDT can continue to make new materials (available online).
References
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