Speaker
Description
“On board a photon” is an educational escape room designed by INAF, aimed at secondary school students (aged 11-18). It combines coding and robotics in a playful way with a scientific narrative – the journey of light in the Solar System – to discover new topics in astronomy while practising computational thinking. The leitmotiv of the activity is the journey of a particle of light, or photon, from its generation in the core of the Sun and its complex trek across the solar interior, all the way across space to one of the Solar System’s planets that reflect it towards Earth, where it eventually lands on a telescope that produces an image of that particular planet. Each challenge is centred on a key step in this journey, using small robots, decoding clues from encrypted devices and solving unplugged coding exercises. It premiered at the 2022 Science Festival in Genoa, and was later offered during the European Researchers Night 2023 in Trieste and the Focus Live! 2024 festival in Milan. We present the design, implementation and evaluation results.
| Destinatari principali | Scuola secondaria di I grado |
|---|---|
| Parole Chiave | escape room, unplugged coding, educational robotics, storytelling, astronomy |