Quantum computers for high school: design of activities for an I SEE teaching module

The thesis is situated within the I SEE project (Inclusive STEM Education to Enhance the capacity to aspire and imagine future careers), a triennial ERASMUS+ project involving six partners, started in 2016 and coordinated by the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna (https://iseeproject.eu/). The main goal of I SEE is the design of teaching approaches and modules on advanced interdisciplinary topics such as climate change, artificial intelligence and quantum computers for secondary school. The modules aim to: i) improve students' ability to imagine the future and to aspire to STEM careers; ii) develop transversal skills that allow students to play an active and conscious role in a global, fragile and constantly changing world. The work of this thesis started from the analysis of an I SEE module on quantum computers realized by the Finnish partners of the project and consists in a revision and integration of their activities in order to solve some problems they encountered during the implementation. This revision aimed to build a better connection between quantum computers and future and to search for a global approach to lead students to understand the physics behind these new technologies without getting trapped in the technical details. In particular, the work I have developed for the present thesis concerns the choice of teleportation as an emblematic case of the quantum protocol and sets as objectives: i) the comparison between the teleportation experiment and the circuit that realizes it, highlighting how the experiment can be reread in terms of logic gates and quantum circuits; ii) the educational transposition and the design of the teaching activity within the module.