Early exposure of digital natives to environments, methodologies and research techniques in university physics

Abstract

Being aware of the motivation problems observed in many scientific oriented careers, we present two experiences to expose college students to environments, methodologies and discovery techniques addressing contemporary problems. This experiences are developed in two complementary contexts: an Introductory Physics course, where we motivated physics students to participate in research activities, and a multidisciplinary incubator of research oriented to advanced undergraduate students of Science and Engineering (that even produced three poster presentations in international conferences). Although these are preliminary results and require additional editions to get statistical significance, we consider they are encouraging results. On both contexts we observe an increase in the students motivation to orient their careers with emphasis on research. In this work, besides the contextualization support for these experiences, we describe six specific activities to link our students to research areas, which we believe can be replicated in similar environments in other educational institutions.