Pixel International Conferences

Philipp Lanfermann¹, Frederik Hensel¹, Mona Christin Maaß¹, Thomas Waitz¹

Department of Chemistry Education, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany¹

As part of a science outreach project of the CRC1073, teaching materials are developed and disseminated to make the corresponding scientific research projects on energy conversion accessible to the non-formal and formal education sector. For the latter, we refer to the model of educational reconstruction and relate perspectives of scientists and students to each other in order to develop curricular valid and learning effective materials [1]. To implement this in a structured and evidence-based way, it is pivotal to have an accurate knowledge of the students’ ideas about the topics that have to be developed. In this contribution, we address the development of our teaching materials about solar cells; in detail we focus on the students’ prior knowledge about the functional principles on the one hand and their knowledge about the dimensions of sustainable design on the other [2]. For this purpose, a literature review of international studies on preconceptions about the working principles of solar cells was carried out. This was supplemented by results of our own preliminary study on prior knowledge about the design criteria of solar cells from a sustainability perspective. The latter include not only technical aspects such as efficiency and durability, but also considerations like recyclability and reparability originating from the model of circular economy or the use of low-cost and non-critical materials [3,4].