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Getting Shocks: Teaching Secondary School Physics Through History

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In this paper I am going to describe the experiences I made in teaching electrostatics through history on secondary school level. In the course I used several replicas of experimental set-ups that were originally used in electrostatic research. This made it possible to (re)perform historical experiments in the classroom, thus enabling the students to make their own experiences. One of the foci in this course was to make visible the change of the style of electrostatic experimentation that took place at the end of the eighteenth century. At the end of the paper I am going to generalise the experiences I made in teaching this unit.

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Heering, P. Getting Shocks: Teaching Secondary School Physics Through History. Science & Education 9, 363–373 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008665723050

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