Teaching Physics in a Swimming Pool

The Physics high school teaching practice shows some serious shortcomings that cause either misconceptions and/or the fragmentation of students’ knowledge. The students at all levels show severe difficulties in grasping the actual meaning of many physical phenomena. This paper presents a sequence of unusual and amusing experiments designed to be carried out by students themselves, under the teacher’ supervision, while diving in a swimming pool. The most relevant of them regard the Newton’s laws and the propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves. The core of the present teaching/learning proposal is to allow the students to observe how Physics laws act in a real-world contest and test if this is effective for them to learn how to derive from their experiences a unified and coherent description of how the nature works. This is done with the aim to increase also their environmental awareness. In the paper the experiences performed by the students are fully analyzed and the results of the final achievement test are discussed. This educational proposal received the 2022 GIREP Sara Barbieri Award.