Inelastic Ion-Surface collisions and physics education

The physics of inelastic ion-surface collisions has interesting point of contact with curricular arguments of secondary school programs, which makes possible interesting educational activities for school pupils in research laboratories. On this basis, in these last years we developed educational activities aimed at introducing school pupils to topics of active scientific research and of societal relevance. Since the education and public outreach is becoming increasingly important in the working life of research scientists, we would like to discuss some of the didactic activities developed, that could be of interest for the broad community of the inelastic ion-surface collisions.