Science education plays a very important role in broadening students’ world outlook. The science classes always discuss real, concrete things and phenomena, which are a part of students’ reality and even everyday life (Lamanauskas, 2003). An important task of science education is making science more relevant to students, more easily learned and remembered, and more reflective of the actual practice of science. It is suggested that students need to develop and/or improve skills in dealing with controversial issues as they prepare to participate in a democratic society. 

In contemporary democratic societies, lay citizens need to understand the nature of scientific knowledge and practice, in order to participate effectively in policy decisions, and to interpret the meaning of new scientific claims which affect their lives (Sandoval, 2005). Science educators thus seem to agree that relevant, real-life, contexts are important when teaching for scientific literacy (Mork and Jorde, 2004).

If some knowledge of science is accepted as part of the education of every student, there is a need to think how best to provide that education (Lemke, 1990). It is therefore important to think of education systemic term, not limiting the student’s experiences to what can possibly take place in the classroom. The role of alternative learning environments becomes critical as a prelude, a complement a follow-up to the school-based learning process. Experiences come from interaction with a learning environment.

The main reason for adopting a socio-cultural perspective as a theoretical framework of analysis was our focus on understanding the relationship between communication, learning and the socio-cultural context. Because in different contexts humans learn in different ways, then individual tend to learn through communication rather than discovery.

This contibution discusses the role of cinema as a tool for science education. By presenting a movie, not only the content is transmitted, but experiences of all kinds: emotions, feelings, attitudes, actions, knowledge, etc., as the cultural acquisition can give to individual symbolic systems of reality´s representation (Arroio, 2007). Movies create trends and have a broader impact on students than any other media.

On several occasions the possibilities of cinema and television as teaching instruments have been overestimated. It was thought, for instance, that the teacher could be miraculously replaced by an audiovisual. The enthusiasm for the language of images led some to believe that the transmission of ideas through audiovisual perception could take the place of verbal language. Many persons with conservative outlooks on teaching have prejudicially underestimated the rational use of audiovisual means by misrepresenting their functions and, not taking advantages of the real possibilities (Brake et al, 2003).

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