La investigación científica expuesta a estudiantes de grado: un caso práctico de Física de la Materia Condensada

Zusammenfassung

Currently, the media tends to present the news sensationally and superficially. In an effort to communicate major scientific breakthroughs to a vast audience, the media presents brief accounts of the findings and more emphasis will be put on those discoveries with more captivating titles. This is particularly worrying when it comes to actual students as it utterly biases their decisions when aiming to pursue a research career. The fact that syllabi tend to leave little to no room for introducing concepts that go beyond the standard curriculum leaves this problem unsolved. With the aim of tackling these issues, we have organized a workshop where experts from various institutions delivered lectures and even performed exhibitions of the phenomena related with Condensed Matter Physics, the field of physics that deals with properties of many-body quantum system with interactions. The initiative, named Recent Advances in Condensed Matter Physics, was aimed at undergraduate Physics students in their last two years at our University. In order to assess the strategies of our learning methodology, the experiment was carried out for three consecutive academic years and feedback from students was collected in the form of homework and surveys. The results show that introducing recent research discoveries in the curricula is a complex yet profitable strategy.