Conduction as a prerequisite to superconductivity

Abstract

As the number of high school students interested in modern physics is always increasing, the University of Milan is developing a project on superconductivity in which experiments and theory are proposed to students. The present paper is divided into two main parts. The first analyzes the basic concepts necessary to understand superconductivity. For a start we propose the first step of a designbased research were students learn the London phenomenological approach. In this way students’ can get the explanation of experiments easy to obtain in the lab-room, such as Meissner effect and the measure of the critical temperature of a type II superconductor. The second part analyzes the results obtained from a written test given to students after a two-hour lesson on conduction. The results highlighted students’ conceptual understanding of electrical conduction and we found out that the relation between electric field and current density (J = E) which is the core of our proposal, can even be useful to overcome common conceptions related to electrical circuits.