Nowadays, developing critical thinking among students is crucial in the context of a large amount of information on various platforms. Students should have basic skills for working with information, whether we are talking about sorting information, its critical assessment and analysis, or information processing. Developing critical thinking in students in several ways and in different situations is possible. In the sciences, one possibility is to emphasize students' critical thinking development when carrying out inquiry-based activities.

The concept of inquiry-based activities is familiar, and by appropriately setting the individual steps of realising these activities, it is possible to develop critical thinking in addition to inquiry competencies. The paper will present several inquiry-based optics activities for secondary schools. Activities are designed to create opportunities for developing selected cognitive skills of critical thinking (e.g. analysis, evaluation, inference and explanation). At the same time, Gen Z's expectations and preferences regarding education were considered in the design of the activities. The applicability of the above activities was validated in the Centre for Informal Physical Education operating at the author's workplace.

Keywords: Physics education, critical thinking, Gen Z, inquiry, experiments, optics.