Introducing General Relativity in high school: a guide for teachers

TL;DR

This paper presents a teacher training approach for introducing General Relativity at the high school level using interactive activities and materials, aiming to enhance physics education and teacher autonomy.

Contribution

It develops and evaluates a novel teacher training program incorporating the rubber sheet analogy to teach General Relativity in high schools.

Findings

Teacher training improved teachers' understanding of GR concepts.

Teachers successfully implemented the activities in classrooms.

Materials proved effective for high school physics education.

Abstract

Introducing Modern Physics represents an increasingly urgent need, towards which physics education concentrates many efforts. In order to contribute to this attempt, at the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Roma Tre University in Rome we focused on the possibility of treating General Relativity (GR) at high school level. We started with an interactive activity addressed to students that exploits the rubber sheet analogy (RSA) to show various phenomena related to gravity using the concept of space-time. Then, having verified its effectiveness, we began to include it among the initiatives the Department carry for high school teacher professional development, with the explicit aim of making them capable of carrying on the activity autonomously in the classrooms. In this paper, we analyse the teacher training approach we realized, and all the materials developed.