Homemade Geometrical Models - Teaching General Relativity at the Secondary School Level with Activities
Abstrakt
In recent years there has been a rising interest in teaching the so-called modern physics in secondary education, one example of which is General Relativity. As part of this effort, a teaching sequence in the form of a workshop has been prepared and run several times both with upper-secondary school students and in-service physics teachers.
The aim of this workshop is to help participants create some concrete idea about concepts like spacetime and curvature. The curvature part is facilitated through a number of practical geometrical activities using various curved surfaces and simple tools such as pieces of paper, markers etc.
This paper will focus mainly on these activities as they can be simply reproduced by students at home, which is especially advantageous during distant learning. Some surfaces, such as a sphere, are easy to recreate, we can use a balloon or a ball.
Other more complicated surfaces, such as a saddle surface or a paraboloid, can be 3D-printed. However, because 3D-printers are not a standard part of our homes, we will discuss some simple ideas how to create and work with these more interesting surfaces at home as well.