„Mommy Comet” Short Stories for Introductory Mechanics

„Mommy Comet” is a set of short stories that transport children in the landscape of the Solar System from the Earth to the Oort cloud. They are the framework of our approach to mechanics in primary school with the aim of introducing the notion of trajectory and the motion of free falling objects in a general context. The key is a unified and simplified sketch of all celestial motions: each body is falling on an elliptical path towards another body. In this paper we report the results of a small experiment with two groups, of about fifty primary school children each, aged six and ten. We focus our attention mainly on drawings made by children during school activities. They indicate a different kind of conceptualization between the first and the fifth grade students: the former are in general more descriptive and figurative in their drawings, while the latter are more abstract and less personal in their descriptions.