Science Ireland a great 10 Years
Science Ireland is celebrating its 10th year travelling to schools with our interactive science shows. Our 10 year celebration was held in GMIT Castlebar on 27th May with local national schools. In September we launched Maths Academy, the aim of which is to teach maths through practical applications to students working in small groups, Maths Academy will run again during March/April 2012 in Mayo.
In Sept, Anthony Caldwell of Science Ireland completed his MPhil in Information Systems in Queens University Belfast on students attitudes to online education based on our website physics.ie. In the same month, we published an article in Physics Education, an Institute of Physics peer-reviewed journal, on a simple method of reproducing Joule’s experiment on heat.
For science week we developed “Battleship Maths” as part of the RDS Science Live lecture series, which showed students the practical application of maths by launching projectiles to hit a target. Also during science week, we created our new Science Fair show for national schools, the Science Fair gets everyone in the schools involved in science for the day.
In Dec 2011, we tested our Physics Problem Solving Workshop, which is a half day transition year module to explore students abilities to work on physics problems and to encourage the uptake in Leaving Certificate physics.
Looking forward to 2012, we hope to continue publishing articles as well as online content to help teachers and students with STEM subjects. We will complete the Physics Problem Solving Workshop and offer it to schools who need to keep the numbers doing physics up. According to the Institute of Physics, in 2011, only 11% of students took Leaving Certificate physics and 25% of schools do not offer physics as a choice. This is a worrying trend but we are confident that with our new method of teaching physics this trend can be reversed.
Happy New Year and we are all looking forward to 2012, where Dublin will host the City of Science festival, which will bring educators and researchers from around the world to Dublin.
Declan of Science Ireland has presented interactive science shows for the last eight years to over 30,000 students in 500 schools around the country. He educational background is in Experimental Physics and he is a member of the Institute of Physics and the American Association of Physics Teachers.
