Egg boxes and spheres as a didactic tool in explanation of the Aufbau principle

Abstract

 The electronic configuration diagrams are schemes that allow explaining some properties of the elements in the periodic table, considering the movement and filling of electrons in the orbitals according to the rules of Hund, to understand concepts at the electronic level such as electronegativity, shielding effect of electrons, ionization energy, and effective nuclear charge, among others. The main objective is that, from the active and meaningful learning, the students can make accessible such an abstract and complex system from the work in the classroom in their know-how, for this they use egg boxes as recyclable material that will represent the orbitals and ping-pong balls to represent electrons as a corpuscular model. This model is applied in classrooms to explain numerical data of the ionization energy as periodic property that one wishes to understand. The models were well assimilated for the sample of students evaluated and allowed to generate discussions within the classroom, argumentative spaces and description of models or prediction of models under a group didactic conceptualization.