New Perspectives in Science Education

How to link Chemistry and Earth Sciences in high schools? Chemistry is considered difficult by teenagers because of its language and themes, far away from reality. Geosciences are often left in the corners and in particular the teaching/learning of minerals and rocks is particularly boring! It is important to find new ways to ensure that students fall in love with these disciplines and acquire their fundamental concepts starting from their interests and linking teaching to everyday life.
In our project we adopt an inquiry based methodology: students pose and answer questions in different steps, for example “How many chemical elements can we find in a mobile phone? Is the mobile phone like a mine for elements? Where these elements are coming from in nature? You bought a new phone: what do you do with your old one?”. Starting from students’ answers different activities were carried out in groups to discover the proprieties and the role of the elements contained in the mobile phone.
The questions / answers methodology open the possibility to introduce the concepts of environmental sustainability, 3Rs (Reduce Reuse Recycle) and Circular Economy.
Subsequently we organized a treasure hunt: students have to find clues to complete tabs related to the different elements and place them in a point of a geographic chart where they think there is a mine of that element. We have especially looked for mines in our territory and decided to visit a still active one. Very interesting is the possibility to interview inhabitants of the mining sites and to search for old geographic maps in university and local libraries to find the presence of old mines now no longer used and to reconstruct the lives of the communities around them.
Finally the project will be open to the problem of mines in exploitation of land georesources as a cause of world conflicts.

Keywords: mines, georesources, geodiversity,competences, periodic table, recycle;