Virtual experiment on platonic solids for teaching space-time quantization

Abstract

The work presents the virtual experiment on Platonic solids in a complementary way, where its importance is crucially used for the treatment of the teaching of the quantization of space-time via loop quantum gravity. The research was part of one of the studies carried out with 23 students in the 3rd year of high school in São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The project is part of several introduced subjects on modern and contemporary physics, as well as frontier research topics. The student starts to have a student-researcher posture and based on Ausubel and Bruner's learning theories, they develop significant learning and receive new information and concepts at the elementary level, conditioning them to a critical and reflective posture. We use the experiment in which students interactively learn three-dimensional shapes, calculate surface area and volume and discover mathematical properties of shapes, necessary knowledge that covers the discussion of the theory. Subsequently, they carried out the skills test and we collected data from the students' operations to present the scenario of innovation and reflection on the possibility of introducing research topics in physics, but with appropriate language for the audience of interest according to Bruner's learning theory.