<title>Continued education and experimental activities for optics education</title>

Abstract

Of the evidence that the optics knowledge is practically unknown for the pupils who complete Basic Education, we initiate, in 1998, a project involving teachers of the Public Network and University teachers with the objective to change this situation. The main cause of this abandonment of optics is the bad understanding by the teachers of the optic phenomena, result of their bad initial formation. Based on this situation, we developed a series of simple experimental activities that demonstrate the main concepts of optics in the program. After that, we elaborate courses of university extension, destined to the teachers of Basic Education, giving emphasis to the experimentation, using kits and demonstrations, complemented by texts, videos and group works. From 98 until now, more than 200 teachers had participated of our course, and they made a sufficiently positive evaluation of these works pointing not only the including of the optics, but also a significant change in its strategies of education, going of meeting to the new parameters of our basic education.