Pixel International Conferences

Working with gifted high school students and creating a culture of excellence becomes an important part of education, especially of education of topics in natural sciences. By engagement of gifted students in relevant scientific research activities and tutoring them through all phases of activities, students achieve various high-level learning outcomes. Nuclear physics is a relevant topic for analysis of natural processes in the environment, and thus it can be very attractive research topic for gifted high school students. Analysis of some of nuclear physics processes in the environment and preparation of related experiments need the collaboration with academic staff at universities and research institutes, which brings additional potentials for students. Thus, tutoring gifted high school students through research projects in nuclear physics could enable students to understand key concepts and phases even in any research projects, bringing new students to universities in STEM fields.

This paper presents the concept of tutoring gifted high school students from preparation and design of simple but relevant experimental setup, theoretical analysis of concepts in nuclear physics, up to the use of experimental setup in simple, but relevant experiments in the environment. The experimental setup has been designed, as a low-cost spectrometer on information technology platform to measure ionising radiation in the environment, such as alpha- and beta-particles of various energies. The paper also includes the challenges that gifted high school students went through and the way they overcome the challenges. In the preparation of the research activities with students we have used the Manual for optional teaching in physics and relevant research papers in nuclear physics for education purposes.

Keywords: gifted students, tutoring, design of experimental setup, optional physics education.

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