How 16 Years Old Students Deal with Electricity Concepts in Inquiry Situation?

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This paper reports a case study where a small group of 16 years old students is engaged in a productive and collaborative process through a SCY mission. This group designs and performs experiments on electricity, processes data, makes calculations, interprets the results and produces documents. From screen and audio records analysis, we look for what these students do with electricity concepts. Occurrences of concepts are coded to specify their characteristics and context of usage. We observe that the students very often encounter and mobilise the electricity concepts all along their work. This is partly due to recurrent difficulties. A comparison of the way students and teachers name concepts shows that the semiotic form of concepts' occurrences is an indicator of the students' mastery of the concepts. Most of the students' difficulties concentrate on physical quantities units and it leads the students to debate about the meaning of units and of the related physical quantities, and about the mathematical relation between concepts. These students also had problems using the web freely to search information. The role of teachers looks fundamental in this case: they guide the students to step out dead ends and to stay in a productive path, and they validate the students' work to support them to go on.