Since childhood, the environment exploration that surrounds us is one of the most common and intriguing activities.
The construction of critical thinking about environmental radioactivity as a natural phenomenon experienced in our everyday life is very important to understand and distinguish what is good or not for our health.
The radioactivity concept is usually associated with uncontrollable danger and irreversible disasters. Nevertheless, in nature, radioactivity has always been present and it is everywhere, radiation comes from the ground, sky, food and even from our body always. The comprehension of environmental radioactivity as a natural phenomenon experienced in our everyday life takes on a crucial role.
The experiments proposed in this section are performed by using the “GammaEDU”, a portable detection backpack for discovering and revealing the presence of radioactive materials in the environment. Through the outdoor measurements, the students can acquire and analyze in real-time gamma-ray spectra to get the abundances and spatial distributions of the terrestrial radionuclides (i.e. U, Th and K).