Studying radioactivity through press news: the case of the Russian spy poisoning

Media constitute an important way for scientific popularization. Nevertheless it is possible to go further, since some news can become an effective teaching aid in formal education of sciences by means of an adequate didactic strategy. In this sense, some pieces of news have been gathered due to their relation to scientific contents in the field of radioactivity, although the incident they referred to belongs to the section of accident and crime reports. The objective is to discuss some methodological guidelines to use that news in science classroom with the aim of reinforcing the study of important concepts and terms about the phenomenon of radioactivity, so that learning could become more interesting and attractive for students.