Quantum mechanics is hard, right? To make it more understandable to high-school students, researchers from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have now created a game that can be used as a teaching tool.
In this paper we introduce the new version of QTris, a board game designed to teach and learn Quantum Mechanics within the framework of Quantum Information and Computation. The key idea behind the game is that every game sequence simulates a process on a system of qubits. Thus, QTris can be effectively integrated as a pedagogical tool to teach Quantum Mechanics at high-school level following a two-state approach. After arguing in support of this latter approach, we describe QTris' basic rules and some of its possible extensions, emphasizing how the game mechanics puts in clear light key quantum concepts such as incompatibility, probabilistic measurement and unitary transformation. Moreover, we report on the results of a QTris-based educational activity which involved about 150 high-school students and provided encouraging preliminary indications that QTris can be a useful pedagogical platform to promote an immediate understanding of some key concepts of Quantum Mechanics.
Abstract Quantum mechanics is a key part of modern science and technology, but its complexity makes it challenging to teach it in schools. We suggest a teaching method for secondary schools that focuses on Bell’s inequalities and how they are tested experimentally. Using students’ understanding of statistics and probability, we provide a step-by-step approach. This includes hands-on activities, like a simple card game, and discussions of CHSH experiments, to help students see the differences between classical and quantum probability. Early testing shows promising results, indicating that this method could be effective.
Abstract 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.