  The paper presents a teaching module about liquid crystals. Since liquid
crystals are linked to everyday student experiences and are also a topic of a
current scientific research, they are an excellent candidate of a modern topic
to be introduced into education. We show that liquid crystals can provide a
file rouge through several fields of physics such as thermodynamics, optics and
electromagnetism. We discuss what students should learn about liquid crystals
and what physical concepts they should know before considering them. In the
presentation of the teaching module that consists of a lecture and experimental
work in a chemistry and physics lab, we focus on experiments on phase
transitions, polarization of light, double refraction and colours. A pilot
evaluation of the module was performed among pre-service primary school
teachers who have no special preference for natural sciences. The evaluation
shows that the module is very efficient in transferring knowledge. A prior
study showed that the informally obtained pre-knowledge on liquid crystals of
the first year students on several different study fields is negligible. Since
the social science students are the ones that are the least interested in
natural sciences it can be expected that students in any study programme will
on average achieve at least as good conceptual understanding of phenomena
related to liquid crystals as the group involved in the pilot study.
