Construção de um agitador magnético caseiro: relato de experiência sobre o ensino por investigação no ensino médio técnico

Abstract

This paper reports on the experience of building a homemade magnetic stirrer with second-year high school students from a full-time technical program in Information Technology, within the "Experimental Practices" course. The study stemmed from student interest following a video demonstrating the equipment's use, leading to a proposal to use alternative materials. The investigative activity followed the "Open Laboratory" model (Azevedo, 2004), and the degrees of freedom regarding the level of inquiry shared between teacher and students were analyzed (Carvalho, 2018) to identify practical aspects of inquiry-based teaching. Data collection and analysis relied on group field journals, individual student reports, and researcher observations. The analysis confirmed a methodological shift toward the "Level 3" and "Level 4" degrees of intellectual freedom proposed in the literature, demonstrating that decentralizing knowledge fosters student resilience in the face of errors. Reflection on the practice revealed that, while the experience strengthened collaborative work and fostered student agency in problem-solving, it also generated high levels of student stress due to the challenge's complexity and curricular time constraints. The study concludes that, despite teacher workload and structural barriers, the open laboratory approach is highly valuable, as it consolidates meaningful learning of physics and chemistry concepts and fosters the maturation of interpersonal relationships.