ROLE – PLAYING AS A CREATIVE METHOD IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

According to a constructivist view of learning and teaching, learning science is an active process in which students construct their own understanding of the life events. Role-playing activities are not very used in science education, although, in cultural education or in social disciplines, such methods are of big interest mostly because they help students to understand things from the perspective of another person.This study explores teaching the structure of matter and abstract physics phenomena topics using role-playing activities. Its aim is to demonstrate that role-playing activities may be a powerful and creative tool in science classrooms and argues for their usefulness in the understanding and teaching of abstract phenomena.Following topics are presented within this study: descriptions of activities, the reactions of the students to this way of instruction and analysis of some role-playing activity design that help students to develop their intuition concerning abstract complex systems. It is also analyzed how this experience can be used in teaching and how it can make teachers aware of the way students learn, if students are conscious of their own learning activity and how students evaluate their understanding of the learned material from the perspective of the future teacher.Due to the fact that role-playing is an interesting, agreeable and motivating way of engaging the student in the activities that are to be presented in classroom and that trough it ideas can be sketched or debates take place, we consider that these are reasons enough to include this method in the didactic repertoire of the future science teacher.