The colours of Newton's Opticks: an advanced project for excellent students
Salvatore Esposito

TL;DR
This paper presents an advanced educational project for high-achieving students that immerses them in Newton's historical experiments and reasoning on light and colors, fostering deep understanding and communication skills.
Contribution
It introduces a historically informed, hands-on project that enhances physics learning through original experiments, reasoning, and public presentation, without requiring advanced mathematical training.
Findings
High student engagement and positive feedback
Effective communication of physics concepts to the public
Successful replication of Newton's experiments by students
Abstract
We describe in detail an advanced project devised for outstanding High School (or undergraduate) students with appropriate abilities in physical reasoning (rather than with a good standard preparation), centered around the well-known historical case of Newton's theory of light and colours. The different action lines along which the project is developed are aimed to let the students involved to: 1) think as Newton did, by building step by step all his knowledge and reasoning; 2) work as Newton did, by performing the whole series of his original experiments with prisms; 3) deduce as Newton did about the nature of light and colours; 4) present the results of their activity (including physics demonstrations) to the general public, in order to test abilities in communicating what learned and discovered (including video realization published on YouTube youtube). Such didactic aim is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHistorical Studies in Science
