The concept of curved space, warped time, gravity as a curvature of spacetime, light as photons, heat as phonons etc., are not a part of the Australian school curriculum or many other parts of the world. These concepts are often ignored as many consider them highly mathematical or only for elite students.

Despite being modern, these concepts have relevance in daily lives. People carry smartphones with them all the time and the working of the Global Positioning System (GPS) depends on the Einsteinian concepts. Apart from this, these concepts have tremendous applications, for example, computer chips, solar panels, medical imaging, and quantum computer.

An international project called the Einstein-First is developing the Einsteinian curriculum for years 3 – 10 Australian students. The project was founded on the premise that every child has the right to share our best understanding of physical reality. The team carefully reviewed the existing science curriculum and found many places where Einsteinian physics can be integrated. The team is developing a spiral curriculum. The concepts learnt at primary school curriculum are revisited in secondary school curriculum. For example, Year 3 students will learn about phonons, atoms and molecules while learning the concept of Heat. Year 5 students will learn about photons while learning the concept of light. The concept of light will then be revisited in Year 9, where students will learn it at a more advanced level. Similarly, Year 7 students will learn the concept of gravity in Einsteinian context and Year 8 students will learn the concept of energy. The team developed several roleplays where students will appreciate how scientists struggle over the years to understand the concept of light, black holes etc.

To support teachers, the team is preparing a detailed lesson plans along with teacher background documents and activity videos.

Modern science curricula contain the foundations and scaffolding that allow the syllabus to include modern physics concepts that are not normally taught. The Big Bang can be refined to include how gravitational waves are being used to determine Hubble’s Constant. Students will develop background knowledge about concepts like expansion of spacetime, particle-antiparticle production in the early universe, emission/absorption spectra and redshift that will enable them to appreciate the meaning and significance of Hubble’s Constant. The work of Slipher, Lemaitre, and Hubble provide a case study for Science as a Human Endeavour. Science Inquiry Skills are included through activities on redshift, parsecs and the Hubble Constant. The content of the unit is presented using practical activities, models, worksheets, videos, power points and consolidation questions. Student and teacher feedback will be used to gauge the effectiveness of the unit; including the ability of the students to grasp the concepts, the students’ level of enjoyment and the teacher’s feelings on facilitating the unit.

In this presentation, I will introduce an approach to cosmology in which students learn about the Hubble Constant, and how gravitational waves allow its measurement without reference to the complex and messy cosmic distances ladder.

For four or five decades, science educators, including physics educators, have benefited from the work of Piaget and neo-Piagetians. Piaget's theory of cognitive development argues that children move through four different stages of mental development, how they acquire knowledge and the role of active learning. Among other issues, neo-Piagetians considered that working memory capacity is affected by biological maturation, restricting young children's ability to acquire complex thinking and reasoning skills. I want to emphasise that these educational developments largely benefitted science teachers and young science learners with many new and improved science curricula and teaching methods.

However, challenges to these views came about when educational researchers observed children’s learning that did not neatly fit these cognitive stages or restrictions. Since the mid 1990’s, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that with appropriate scaffolding by teachers and opportunities for student collaboration that young learners can become engaged with and understand abstract scientific concepts that might otherwise be seen to be out of reach for this age group.

Based on this premise from recent research in educational psychology, the work of the EinsteinFirst group has embarked on studies that demonstrate how young learners from primary school onwards engage with and do learn abstract Einsteinian physics concepts that were previously considered best taught only in upper high school.

Traditional science education wisdom suggests that abstract concepts are beyond the majority of primary-school aged students. This includes introducing atoms and molecules.

The Einstein-First curriculum introduces atoms and molecules into Year 3 via songs, role plays and simple atomic models made from plasticine (modelling clay) and balls with embedded magnets. They use these models and analogies to relate what they see at a macroscopic level to the miniscule structures of atoms and molecules, and the electrical forces that hold them together. At this early stage, we concentrate particularly on students becoming familiar with the language of modern science: atoms, molecules and photons.

The challenge is to introduce an atomic model that is faithful to the quantum and probabilistic nature of atoms and yet avoids both the misconceptions of planetary type orbitals which dominate almost all introductory chemistry. Instead we show easily accessible images from the internet of the beautiful complexity of electron orbitals. We present atoms as a miniscule nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by an electron cloud in which the electrons are ‘in there somewhere’.

This presentation will concisely outline our spiral learning approach in which students in Years 3 to 6 will revisit and develop concepts throughout four years of primary education. They will leave primary school with clear concepts of photons and phonons, changes of state (Year 3), physical properties of materials (Year 4), states of matter (Year 5) and simple reversible and irreversible changes to materials.

Why, modern physics is, still today, more than 100 years after its birth, privilege of an elite of scientists and unknown for the great majority of citizens? The answer is simple, since modern physics is in general not present in the standard physics curricula, except for some general outlines, in the final years of some secondary schools. But, is it possible to teach modern physics in primary school? Is it effective? And, also, is it funny for the students? We firmly believe that general relativity and quantum mechanics are among the greatest intellectual achievements of mankind and, hence, their knowledge and appreciation should not be reserved to an elite of researchers; consequently,
we are convinced that, in the spirit of Einstein First project, students of all ages need to be exposed to the current paradigm of physics. Starting from these premises, in this talk we report the results of an intervention performed in the last year of Italian primary school in which we introduced some concepts of the theory of relativity, such as the role of the reference frame, the velocity addition law, the peculiar characteristics of light propagation, the role of simultaneity and, eventually, gravitational interactions according to the Einsteinian picture.

A timely challenge in current physics education is to develop educational tracks aimed at introducing advanced high school students to the main concepts of quantum theory. While standard tracks are historical in nature, going from Planck’s hypothesis to the Schrödinger equation, several points of this history tend to be left out. However, the richness of the history of quantum physics makes much more material available, part of which could potentially be adopted to enhance students’ understanding of basic quantum physics. In this respect, the pivotal work by Einstein stands out, because of its clarity and readability, also for modern readers, and especially because many of the characteristic features of quantum physics can in fact be traced to some paper by him on the quantum theory of radiation. This is the case of light quanta (introduced in 1905, and then applied to the photoelectric effect), wave-particle duality for light (1909) and probability (1916). These concepts were all introduced using clear and compelling statistical arguments, which however are not part of usual high school curricula. We were led to think that high school students can be fruitfully be exposed to the above material, and therefore we developed a didactic track, which introduces some characteristic concepts of quantum physics in a way that follows Einsteins’ original arguments. This can be done in a way that requires nothing more than elementary integral calculus and statistics, plus elements of classical physics which are part of the standard curriculum of advanced high school students. Such a track can then usefully complement the usual historically oriented curricula, while giving the students a grasp of subtle quantum concepts, which can also help them when they come to more advanced topics such as matter waves, the Schrödinger equation and Born’s rule.

A particle physics workshop for UK primary schools has been designed and trialed in 2016-2017 as a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the Odgen Trust. The workshop allows young children (ages 8–11) to learn the world of fundamental particles, use creative design to make particle models, and learn creatively about how particles interact. The initial resources were reviewed and improved, based on the feedback received from school teachers and communicators. The final workshop has been delivered in many primary schools in UK in 2017-2020, receiving very positive evaluation and clear evidence of impact. A set of primary school teachers have been trained to deliver the workshop. Resources specifically created for teachers and educators have been made available on the University website. Despite particle physics is often classified as a subject too difficult and abstract for primary schools, the workshop uses familiar concepts to children that make particle physics accessible and enjoyable. The workshop explores the ability of young children to be imaginative and creative and exploits it to teach them the fundamentals of particle physics in a fun way. Most importantly, the workshop is effective in enthusing children to modern science and gives a wider understanding of how science works. The resources have been used in the Playing with Protons events for teachers at CERN, and have been translated in Greek and Italian.

Educating to quantum physics K12 students and general public represents a no longer evitable must, while quantum technologies are going to revolutionize our lives. Quantum literacy is a formidable challenge and an extraordinary opportunity for a massive cultural uplift, where citizens learn how to engender creativity and practice a new way of thinking, essential for smart community building.

Scientific thinking hinges on analyzing facts and creating understanding, then formulated with the dense mathematical language for later fact checking. Within classical physics, learners’ intuition can be educated via classroom demonstrations of everyday-life phenomena. Their understanding can even be framed with the mathematics suited to their instruction degree. For quantum physics instead, we have no experience of quantum phenomena and the required mathematics is beyond non-expert reach. Therefore, educating intuition needs imagination. Without rooting to experiments and some degree of formal framing, educators face the risk to provide only evanescent tales, often misled, while resorting to familiar analogies.

Here, we report on the realization of QPlayLearn, an online platform conceived to explicitly address challenges and opportunities of massive quantum literacy. QPlayLearn’s mission is to provide multilevel education on quantum science and technologies to anyone, regardless of age and background. To this aim, innovative interactive tools enhance the learning process effectiveness, fun, and accessibility, while remaining grounded on scientific correctness. Examples are games for basic quantum physics teaching, on-purpose designed animations, and easy-to-understand explanations on terminology and concepts by global experts. As a strategy for massive cultural change, QPlayLearn offers diversified content for different target groups, from primary school all the way to university physics students. It is addressed also to companies wishing to understand the potential of the emergent quantum industry, journalists and policy makers needing to seize what quantum technologies are about, and all quantum science enthusiasts.

The Clementine Gnomon was built in 1700-1702 by Francesco Bianchini upon the will of the Pope Clement XI. The aim of such 45 meters' meridian line was to measure the secular variation of the obliquity of the ecliptic, epsilon. This is measurable as well the much smaller nutation effect, on the solar positions near the solstices.
I will analyze the observational campaing 2018-2021 with respect to the following keywords: ephemerides, aberration, nutation, proper motion, precession, refraction anomalies, apsides, solstices, equinoxes, tropical year, Sun rotation, equation of time, Earth rotation and DUT1, obliquity, eccentricity, air turbulence, time accuracy and metrological precision.
This meridian line is located in the Basilica of santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome, and is visited by thousands of students each year.
Special attention is dedicated at the December's solstices during with the position of both limbs and its meridian transit can reach the maximum relative accuracy, allowing also the vision and the timing of the major sunspots.
The quadratic fitting of these solstice's data obtain a general resolution on the epsilon parameter of one arcsecond, unaffected by the field curvature for optical aberration because the objective is a 25 mm lensless pinhole.

The knowledge of the instants of "anni cardines" i.e. solstices and equinoxes allows to formulate, within a uniform circular motion approach, the eccentric theory of the Earth orbit, obtaining a precise determination of the current apsides dates (4-6 january and 4-6 July) and of the Earth's orbital eccentricity. This is the double of the keplerian eccentricity -simply because of ellipse's definition-.

All those considerations pave the way to modern astrometry, where the sub-arcsecond accuracy is required in order to detect clearly the relativistic effect.

Two Geogebra-based interactive applications to teach the Special Relativity Energy-Mass-Momentum relation are presented. They are useful tools to visualise from a geometrical perspective the mathematical relation, thus helping students facing calculus difficulties to understand the beauty of this equation. They also give students the opportunity to carry out explorations and come to conclusions. They allow us to inquire the meaning of the p/E ratio for particles with different masses and energies, to discover that a system with a given finite mass and increasing energy travels at a speed approaching a finite value. Even the relativistic meaning of the mass of a system of particles can be addressed with these applications. Students can discover that the relativistic mass is different from the mere sum of the masses of the system, that is always greater than or equal to the sum of the masses, that it depends on the momenta directions, that is equal to the sum of the masses if all the particles of the system are at rest. Since these concepts are crucial for the understanding of how particles are discovered in Particle Physics, the two applications open the way to introduce students to the main aspect of modern research in Nuclear and Accelerators Physics.