Science on Stage 2013: sharing best-practice teaching ideas
From 25-28 April 2013, about 350 science teachers met in Slubice, Poland, during the Science on Stage festival.
The main focus of the event is to offer science and mathematics teachers a platform from which they will exchange teaching projects and network together. The projects presented at the festival in 2013 were selected from 25 European countries.
The Science on Stage festival gives teachers the opportunity to present their best-practice ideas for science education and inspire colleagues through workshops, technical lectures and onstage presentations. In this way, good-practice-examples are spread all over Europe. Follow-up activities are organised by the National Committees of Science on Stage in order to encourage and inspire teachers who were not able to attend the festival itself.
Science educators from informal education centres, such as museums, also presented alternative resources. For example, science educators from the Marinha Planetério, Portugal, designed a map of the sky for blind students. The children can discover the sky by touching a sphere engraved with constellations and the main stars. Another group from the National Education Institute of Slovenia presented their homemade lenses built with wax, an inexpensive transparent moldable substance. These lenses can be use to introduce geometrical optics in schools.
Special encouragement toward collaboration was provided through workshops and networking meetings. Teachers pointed out the difficulty to collaborate with other schools, especially between countries due to differences in curricula for example. Nevertheless they agreed that collaboration is beneficial in developing the pupils’ skills, in areas such as communication or experiment building.
For more information and to see the shows, visit the Science on Stage website.
