New Perspectives in Science Education

The present paper represents the dissemination of activities which I have unfolded  with my students during my  Physics classes, in which  I approached themes from the Physics curriculum , starting from concepts that deal with astronomy and space. The activities were designed using the experience and the resources acquired  from my participation in workshops organized by European institutions such as the European Space Agency and European School in the field of teaching STEM disciplines. Taking into consideration the fact that space exploration is a topic that arouses interest at any age, the connection between theoretical concepts and real world  can be done in a way that stimulates creativity, critical thinking and collaboration.  Most of  the activities I carried out with my students had  a positive impact on them . Some of them are the launch of rockets to study motion equations ,verifying  Kepler's laws, themes related  to  launching  satellites, Lagrange points. All these activities helped stimulate interest in space, technology and engineering, and students were driven to develop ideas into simple space exploration projects. Exploring the Universe using real-world data from telescopes offered students the opportunity to understand the concepts of electromagnetism and spectroscopy, and the planned activities offered  them the chance to enrich their knowledge. The activities carried out were designed to suit  the Inquiry based learning method in order to make  use of ICT tools in different lesson sequences and  also to stimulate student cooperation and teamwork.

Keywords: STEM, Inquiry based learning, space exploration