EUROPEAN STUDENTS SHOW HOW TO MAKE SCIENCE FUN!
The success story of Xperimania continued in the 2008-2009 school year with the new “Check out the property” competition that invited students to create a test to investigate a property in a daily object, identify materials with the property and further find out about its use in everyday life.
Almost 900 secondary schools students from 20 European countries have responded to the Xperimania competition and 31 classes in 17 EU countries participated throughout the school year to the multilingual chats. (see below).
… and the winners are
The five overall winners were selected from a total of 430 entries. Based on a pre-selection, a panel of scientific and educational experts from Cefic and European Schoolnet were asked to consider the scientific accuracy, the presentation, the originality and the creativity of each entry.
The first prize goes to British team Jack M (13) and Nicola B (13) from Smithycroft Secondary in Glasglow They have investigated and tested the properties of disposable baby nappies and identified polyacrylate as the material that makes nappies water absorbent.
2nd prize goes to Margred K (17, Meriliis K (17) and Indrek V from Estonia for their “Beauty of Polymer Clay” investigating heat resistance.
3rd prize goes to Artur S (15), Aleksandr I (15), Jekaterina S (15) for their “Researching air and cold protection from different fibers” submission.
4th and 5th prizes go to Spain, respectively to Elis C (13) and Elisabet D (14) for “Resistance to the traction of textile fibers”, and to Marta B (13) and Gemma C. (12) for “Investigating plastics capacity for soundproofing”.
Besides the five winners, the jury decided to give out two special mentions: The special mention for creativity went for a Hungarian team testing an exciting topic of liquid magnets, and the special mention of the best class project was given for three teams from a Portuguese school with excellent videos showing how to make science education fun.
MULTILINGAL XPERIMANIA ONLINE CHATS
"How does the automotive industry rely on petrochemicals?"(23 March 2009)
German-speaking students quizzed BASF expert on how chemistry contributes to developing greener and safer cars. Many questions were related to the impact of petrochemical innovations on the environmental efficiency of a car, to future technologies in the car industry. Students were obviously concerned with the benefits of petrol in comparison with other fuels, including bio alternatives. The full transcript of the chat is now available here.
"How are chemicals used in art restoration?"(5 February 2009)
This was a unique opportunity for students to hear from our French-speaking guest-expert Mrs Myriam Serck-Dewaide, Director General at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, how chemistry helps to preserve the world's artistic and cultural heritage. From the evaluation of the works, the description of the restoration process, the durability of the restoration, students learned a lot about how two seemingly very distant fields such as art and chemistry are coming closer to each other and what to do -or not do- when you want to preserve a work of art for future generations. See the full chat transcript. "(Petro)chemicals: who needs them?" (20 January 2009)
During this chat, held in English, British science journalist Andy Brice has accepted to explain to the students how he tried to avoid getting into contact with friendly chemicals over a week. Even if there are alternatives to those chemicals, one has to consider the cost, scale of production and the properties of a given material. It also turned out that avoiding polypropylene is an almost impossible challenge, as it is suited for so many applications. As a conclusion it turned out that some students still seemed genuinely surprised that chemicals played such a major role in their daily life. See the chat transcript. Xperimania chat on chemical industry's response to climate change concerns.
The 1st 2008-2009 Xperimania chat took place on 6 November when Spanish-speaking students and teachers came with their climate-change related questions to Enrique Espi, Senior Toxicologist at REPSOL YPF in Madrid.
How to consume less energy, how is the petrochemical industry handling the CO2 issue, are there new ways to create energy, is a new ice-age possible were some of the students' concern. A summary of the chat and the whole transcript (available in Spanish only) are now available on line. print
