The teaching of quantum physics is challenging, not the least because teachers must overcome the traditional narrative approach, students must gain a conceptual understanding of fundamentals, and citizens must become aware of quantum technologies. Quantum games are powerful tools to overcome obstacles and push one’s limits without fear of failure. We report on a pilot study involving twenty high-school student volunteers, consisting of a compact intervention module on the concepts of quantum states, properties, measurement, superposition, and entanglement within the framework of the Model of Educational Reconstruction, followed by playing a game, quantum TiqTaqToe. The outcomes of this research-based learning environment are discussed via the qualitative analysis of students’ answers to two open questionnaires. We find that students grasped the concepts of superposition and, with special awareness, entanglement, the game proving effective to help students experience their implications in quantum behavior. The informal and stimulating tournament atmosphere favored intertwining of the game with learning goals. Our central message is that the use of quantum game tools fits a teaching/learning environment in manners often not well understood in the literature; it enhances awareness of the nature of new and non-intuitive concepts, increases complementarity with other languages within the process of thinking about physics, boosts student engagement, and improves intervention efficiency and effectiveness.

Stimulated by the European project “QTEdu CSA”, within the flagship “Quantum Technologies”, a community of researchers active in the fields of quantum technologies and physics education has designed and implemented an extracurricular course on quantum physics concepts and quantum technologies applications for high school. The course, which featured eight interactive lectures, was organized online between March and May 2021 and attended by about 250 students from all over Italy. In this paper, we describe the main tenets and activities of the course. Moreover, we report on the effectiveness of the course on students’ knowledge of the basic concepts of quantum physics and students’ views about epistemic aspects and applications of quantum technologies. Results show that the designed activities were effective in improving students’ knowledge about fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and familiarizing them with quantum technology applications.

Quantum mechanics is included in many curricula across countries because of its cultural value and technological application. In the last decades, two-state approaches to quantum mechanics became popular because of the age of quantum computers. This article presents an experiment with 24 Hungarian high school students on teaching/learning quantum mechanics according to Dirac’s approach to concepts and basic formalism developed in the context of light polarization. Tutorials, pre/post-tests, and oral interviews are the main monitoring tools used to collect data on the students’ learning path. From the qualitative and quantitative data analysis, learning progressions emerged in the phenomenology exploration and on the probabilistic nature of single quantum measurement. The students’ conceptions of quantum state are enriched, confirming the importance to focus educational approaches on fundamental topics. For one section of students, the complex relationship between quantum state and property remained problematic, but the students’ interpretations of a quantum state can be categorized. Two lines of reasoning emerged regarding the impossibility to attribute a trajectory to a quantum system, one more orthodox and one that seeks to avoid the probabilistic nature of the quantum world.

Teacher-oriented journals provide many ideas for practical use of multimedia in physics teaching and learning. However, they are often written in their respective native languages. Moreover, having 24 official languages in the European Union is a huge barrier to the exchange of teaching and learning material. Knowledge about what is discussed in neighbouring countries is rare. Hence, in this article scientific members of the MPTL group (Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning) present a review on multimedia applications and the corresponding concepts that are discussed in non-English language journals. 491 articles in 34 teacher-oriented journals from 10 countries are reviewed, using a list of 81 categories, to characterise addressed topics, teaching strategies, technology and multimedia features. Log-linear multiway frequency and cluster analysis were used to get more insights about preferred combinations of content and teaching strategies, differences between countries, changes between periods and patterns of articles. There is a divergence in the main topics focused on between countries and some changes within the periods 2006–2010 and 2011–2015. Such a large diversity of ideas and concepts covered throughout the EU highlights the potential benefits of more international exchange. However, findings also point to additional requirements, concerning theoretical background, ideas for implementations of modern features like augmented reality, and the use of internet-based sources and modern devices. Thus this article is also calling for more exchange and discussions concerning topics to be addressed in teacher-oriented journals.

Teaching and learning quantum mechanics is one of the most demanding educational and conceptual challenges, in particular in secondary schools where students do not possess an adequate mathematical background to effectively support the description of quantum behaviour. Educational research shows that traditional approaches, generally based on historical and narrative perspectives, are only partially effective. The reason is that they do not address in depth those basic quantum concepts that radically question the fundamentals of classical physics. A research-based educational program has been proposed to two final-year classes of an Italian scientific high school. In order to build the main concepts of quantum mechanics and their formal basic representation via real and simulated experiments, the program uses the light polarization as a context. A quantum game was then integrated in the educational program, to support students’ learning. Their conceptual paths, monitored by means of tutorials and questionnaires, show significant student learning especially on the concept of state and on appropriating the formalism meaning, whereas students more frequently referred to the geometrical vector representation instead of the algebraic-analytic formula. The quantum game has emerged to support intuition and operative experience in distinguishing the foundational concepts of superposition and entanglement.

The physics of the last century is now included in all EU secondary school curricula and textbooks, even if in not organic way. Nevertheless, there are very different positions as concern its introduction and students' conceptual knots in classical physics are quoted to argue the exclusion of modern physics in secondary school. Aspects discussed in literature are goals, rationale, contents, target students, instruments and methods. Very different goals, i.e. the culture of citizens, popularization, guidance, education, build different perspectives and aspects to treat selection: fundament, technologies and applications. Methods used are story telling of the main results, argumentation of crucial problems, integrated or as a complementary part in the curriculum. Modern physics in secondary school is a challenge, which involves curriculum innovation, teacher education and physics education research to individuate ways that allows the students to face the interpretative problems and manage them in many contexts and in social decisions. In this perspective, modern physics is an integrated content in curricula involving the building of formal thinking. Our research focus on building of formal thinking is on three directions: 1) Learning processes and role of reasoning in operative hands-on and minds-on phenomena interpretation; 2) object-models as tools to bridge common sense to physics ideas and ICT contribution focusing on real time labs and modelling; 3) building theoretical way of thinking: a path inspired of Dirac approach to quantum mechanics. We developed four different kind of proposals: 1) the physics of modern research analysis in material science: resistivity and Hall effect for electrical transport properties, Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy to look to structure characteristics, Time Resolved Resistivity for epitaxial growth; 2) Explorative approach to superconductivity phenomena (a coherent paths), 3) Discussion of some crucial / transversal concepts both in classical physics and modern physics: state, measure, cross section, 4) foundation of theoretical thinking in quantum mechanics.