O ensino da Relatividade restrita no Ensino Médio: desafios e estratégias didáticas

Abstract

In 2025, it is the 120 the anniversary of the Albert Einstein revolutionary article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” in which he introduced the theory of special relativity and its application in electrodynamics. Even more than a century later, teaching relativity to high school students still seems to be secondary and is often treated as a topic to be addressed only out of pure pedagogical obligation. This paper seeks to present a proposal for teaching the phenomena of special relativity to high school students, showing how such phenomena actually occur in reality and how they can often seem strange from the point of view of classical mechanics, which is so often covered in the school curriculum. To achieve this, it is necessary to apply specific methodological techniques that can break the feeling of skepticism and strangeness that students feel when they are introduced, for the first time, to characteristics that relate time and space.