Quantum mechanics at high school: an online laboratory on wave-particle duality

TL;DR

This paper presents an online laboratory activity on wave-particle duality designed for high school students to enhance their understanding of quantum mechanics through experiments and student feedback.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online laboratory activity for high school students to explore wave-particle duality, including design, implementation, and qualitative evaluation.

Findings

High student engagement and satisfaction with the online lab.

Positive feedback on the educational effectiveness of the activity.

Motivational issues discussed to improve future implementations.

Abstract

The interest in studying quantum mechanics is always increasing in our society and schools. Especially in the latter case, this leads researchers to implement suitable actions to meet social needs of knowledge of quantum physics. We present an online laboratory on wave-particle duality for high school students (17-19 years old). The activity has been carried out in the period December 2021 - May 2022 at the Physics Department of the University of Cagliari and more than 100 students from different high schools in Sardinia have been involved. We will show the design of the activity and the experiments performed. We will show and discuss qualitatively results about a satisfaction questionnaire. A brief discussion about motivational issues will be done.