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The present paper summarizes the building of the GIREP community on teaching and learning quantum physics in secondary school and the results of the community’s first discussion workshop. The questions for the workshop were prepared using feedback from the community members. The participants to the Working Discussion in Budapest Conference were divided in five groups, each focusing on distinct approaches in teaching quantum physics, as identified by the community. The five groups discussed the questions and identified core concepts that any course on quantum physics should cover. They also identified some specificities of each approach and discussed which approaches are particularly well suited or poorly suited to address specific concepts. The paper describes the creation of the community, the process of selecting the questions for the workshop and the results of the discussion on specific questions. The group identified potential research questions that should be addressed with future research. The results are summarized into a short position statement on the future goals of the community.

Quantum mechanics is included in many curricula across countries because of its cultural value and technological application. In the last decades, two-state approaches to quantum mechanics became popular because of the age of quantum computers. This article presents an experiment with 24 Hungarian high school students on teaching/learning quantum mechanics according to Dirac's approach to concepts and basic formalism developed in the context of light polarization. Tutorials, pre/post-tests, and oral interviews are the main monitoring tools used to collect data on the students’ learning path. From the qualitative and quantitative data analysis, learning progressions emerged in the phenomenology exploration and on the probabilistic nature of single quantum measurement. The students’ conceptions of quantum state are enriched, confirming the importance to focus educational approaches on fundamental topics. For one section of students, the complex relationship between quantum state and property remained problematic, but the students’ interpretations of a quantum state can be categorized. Two lines of reasoning emerged regarding the impossibility to attribute a trajectory to a quantum system, one more orthodox and one that seeks to avoid the probabilistic nature of the quantum world.

There is consensus on the goal to introduce Quantum Mechanics in secondary school curricula for its paradigmatic role in the modern physics. In literature a wide spectra of proposals were developed and tested. With the goal to approach the basic ideas of quantum theory by means of active learning, we design a research based educational path in the context of light polarization, offering an open software environment for ideal experiments. Several Intervention Modules with secondary school students were performed, monitoring the learning paths by means of tutorials and pre-post-test for total about 900 students. Here a homogenous sample of 126 students is considered. Qualitative/quantitative data analysis shows coherent line of reasoning developed by students along the quantum concepts, coherent in some case with a hidden variables approach.

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