The whole structure, moreover, is supposed to provide a further substantial contribution to enable the students to
address the known conceptual difficulties in understanding thermodynamics. Our hypothesis is indeed that the
difficulties can be only partially addressed by making the single concepts clearer and clearer and by avoiding
confusion between macroscopic and microscopic levels of description. To solve such difficulties also implies
explicitly facing the “strangeness” of the modelling game implicit in the macroscopic approach to thermodynamics.
The implementations of multi-perspectiveness, multi-dimensionality and longitudinality enforced us to make the
effort of making the macroscopic approach strongly self-consistent and open to comparison with the mechanistic
way of modelling systems and interaction. In the next section this point will be described in detail (§3.1): it is in fact
the main key for following the brief presentation of the conceptual skeleton of disciplinary reconstruction. Figures 1
and 2 show, on a time line, the activities implemented by the teachers. The figures represent an attempt to visualize
the back-and-forth dynamics needed to play out the forms of productive complexity and to guide the collective
reasoning to stop, look back-around-over and go on.