Lab2Go: a project for supporting laboratory practice in teaching STEM disciplines in high school

The laboratory practice is essential for learning physics and scientific subjects; unfortunately it is often overlooked in teaching. In order to establish a contact between schools and experimental science, Sapienza Università di Roma and INFN launched Lab2Go, an initiative in the framework of Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e per l’Orientamento (PCTO) and supported by Piano Lauree Scientifiche (PLS), with the goal of spreading laboratory practice among students and teachers in high schools. Lab2Go was born in Rome and focused on physics, however in just few years it expanded across Italy thanks to an increasing involvement of INFN and university departments and enlarged its scope to other disciplines (animal biology, botany, chemistry, geology, robotics, scientific museology). Moreover, for preserving the mission of promoting hands-on learning despite the restrictions introduced by COVID-19 pandemic, Lab2Go@Home has been introduced: on-line seminars aimed at showing experiments that can be reproduced at home using easily accessible materials, using resources such as smartphones apps, web tools and devices as the Arduino board.