Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

The Officina della Luce is an educational initiative co-designed with teachers to bring tinkering practices into formal school contexts. The project combines playful exploration with structured reflection, engaging both teachers and students in authentic processes of scientific inquiry. Teachers first take part in professional development sessions, where they experience tinkering activities themselves and reflect on how to integrate them into classroom practice. Students then explore phenomena, in this case light and shadow, reflection, and colour mixing, through playful, hands-on sessions. Each playful phase is followed by a reflection stage, where students’ research questions are elicited and guide the next steps. This creates an iterative cycle: playful tinkering sessions generate new inquiries, which in turn lead to further playful experimentation and reflection. Preliminary results show that this iterative process helps students formulate authentic scientific questions while fostering autonomy, persistence, and creativity. Teachers reported that the activities enriched classroom dynamics and offered opportunities to connect spontaneous exploration with core physics concepts. This contribution will share both methodological insights and classroom examples from Officina della Luce, providing teachers with tools and inspiration to bring iterative cycles of tinkering and reflection into their science teaching.

About Sara Ricciardi

Senior Permanent researcher at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio. She has worked for 10 years in experimental cosmology in the field of data analysis of experiments to measure cosmic microwave background radiation. From 2012 she carried on her research in Physics Education for full scientific citizenship, working constructionist approaches. He designs materials and interventions, especially with primary schools. She is memeber of the Office of Astronomy for Education Center Italy. She is also the Deputy Director of the Game Science Research Center hosted by IMT Lucca