The daily use of electronic devices, which are mostly based on semiconductor diodes and transistors, has become very common. The understanding of some concepts related to semiconductor materials is very important to achieve a better comprehension of these devices. Although this statement appears in the official documents and in national Brazilian curricular parameters (PCN), in practice there is a small number of proposals in this direction. Thus, the purpose of this article was to describe the use of a sequence with four short videos to teach introductory concepts of semiconductors at high-school level. These videos were shown to two classes of third grade of high school, with a total of 72 students. After each video, we gave the students a questionnaire with 16 Likert items, in order to measure the students’ attitudes regarding some concepts discussed in the videos. Analyzing the questionnaire results, we saw the effectiveness of the proposal, mainly with respect to the students motivation to study this subject. The majority of concepts were well assimilated, and the few difficulties were in agreement with literature. This suggests that the use of short videos is a strategy that can be more used, mainly due its versatility and very limited need of technical resources.
Keywords:
semiconductors; audiovisual resources; videos for teaching