Understanding and constructing domain-specific external representations, such as kinematic diagrams, is an important goal of engineering education. International standards (ISO 3952-1) prescribe their format in terms of graphical elements in black and white and two dimensions. However, during training, the canonical format is often modified under…

The experiment that we present in this paper explores the teaching of Galilean motion principles observed in different reference frames, in an astronomical context. All grade 10 students in a French high school (the lycée Condorcet, Val de Marne) participated in two successive teaching-learning sessions, designed within the theoretical framework…

The objective of this work was to highlight the conceptions of force held by students aged 10-17 years old, in situations where animate and inanimate objects interact. In the proposed experimental situations, we varied parameters such as the motion and position of an object and the agent's effort. We asked questions about both inanimate and…

This study aims to better understand the construction of the meaning of physics concepts in mechanics during a teaching sequence at the upper secondary school level. In the teaching sessions, students were introduced to the concepts of interaction and force. During this teaching sequence the models called "interactions" and "laws of…