TY  - EJOU
AU  - Albéri, Matteo
AU  - Baldoncini, Marica
AU  - Bottardi, Carlo
AU  - Chiarelli, Enrico
AU  - Landsberger, Sheldon
AU  - Raptis, G. Kassandra
AU  - Serafini, Andrea
AU  - Strati, Virginia
AU  - Mantovani, Fabio
TI  - Training Future Engineers to Be Ghostbusters: Hunting for the Spectral Environmental Radioactivity
T2  - Education Sciences

PY  - 2019
VL  - 9
IS  - 1
SN  - 2227-7102

AB  - Although environmental radioactivity is all around us, the collective public imagination often associates a negative feeling to this natural phenomenon. To increase the familiarity with this phenomenon we have designed, implemented, and tested an interdisciplinary educational activity for pre-collegiate students in which nuclear engineering and computer science are ancillary to the comprehension of basic physics concepts. Teaching and training experiences are performed by using a 4” × 4” NaI(Tl) detector for in-situ and laboratory γ-ray spectroscopy measurements. Students are asked to directly assemble the experimental setup and to manage the data-taking with a dedicated Android app, which exploits a client-server system that is based on the Bluetooth communication protocol. The acquired γ-ray spectra and the experimental results are analyzed using a multiple-platform software environment and they are finally shared on an open access Web-GIS service. These all-round activities combining theoretical background, hands-on setup operations, data analysis, and critical synthesis of the results were demonstrated to be effective in increasing students’ awareness in quantitatively investigating environmental radioactivity. Supporting information to the basic physics concepts provided in this article can be found at http://www.fe.infn.it/radioactivity/educational.
KW  - physics education
KW  - laboratory activity
KW  - environmental radioactivity
KW  - nuclear engineering experiment
KW  - Web-GIS platform
KW  - scintillator detector
KW  - Android app
KW  - in-situ measurements
KW  - computer science application
KW  - γ-ray spectroscopy
DO  - 10.3390/educsci9010015