It was presented an array of trial activities guided to the teaching of general physics in the second period of the engineering courses organized in the form of a sequence in which the students explore, test and discuss the behavior of a tracted rubber. It was expanded the expression to the elastic force, adding to Hooke's law a quadratic term which allows having a didactic discussion of the parameters "Young's module" and "Poissson's coefficient". The theoretical underlying adopted in the development of this proposal relies on Vigotski's social-historical theory. In the course of the activities, it was searched to form new concepts from the moment in which the students were aware of their needs.
teaching of physics; trial; scientific concept formation; Young's module; Poisson's coefficient
