The paper presents the teaching materials on thermodynamics designed both to foster conceptual understanding,
and to support students to find a personal way for appropriating content knowledge. The design shows that a
consistent implementation of some forms of complexity implies content knowledge to be clarified for facing
apparent paradoxes intrinsic in the thermodynamics game of modeling systems and processes. In the paper, we
argue why the solution of such paradoxes requires content analysis to be moved on an epistemological dimension. In
this sense, the multi-dimensional structure is argued to provide a substantial contribution to enable students to
address deep learning difficulties.
The results of the materials implementations confirm the design hypotheses: the forms of complexity revealed to
be productive for supporting students to learn not only the disciplinary contents, but also to situate their learning in
wide and personal projects of intellectual and emotional growth (Levrini et al., 2010; 2011; Fantini & Levrini,
2012).
A further corroboration comes from a teaching/learning experiment on quantum physics at upper secondary
school (grade 13) where the same forms of complexity oriented the materials design.
Also these results show that the specific structure of the materials allowed unavoidable kinds of difficulty in
learning quantum physics to be transformed into real cultural challenges at reach of secondary school students
(Levrini & Fantini, 2013).
The future directions of the research is to point out how, when and why the features of the materials trigger and
support personal appropriation of physics.