New Perspectives in Science Education

INTACT (Interactive Teaching materials Across Culture and Technology) a multilateral Comenius Project involving six different countries develops interactive teaching and learning resources for bilingual education in different science fields and provides them on an online platform developed that allows synchronous, collaborative work at different locations on a shared task. The online platform can also be used as repository and facilitator. Teachers can easily combine existing resources with the developed ones and thereby create new scenarios tailored for their classroom.

The project has created and implemented reliable teaching resources for Mathematics, Geography, Technology, Primary Science, Secondary Science and Environmental Education with the aim to promote a culture of collaboration among students and an interactive approach to learning inside and outside the classroom. Since the technological requirements in schools are diverse, the teaching resources will be implemented in HTML 5, thus ensuring independence of specific hard- or software.

Society is in permanent mutance and education, particularly, the education in sciences, must follow this dynamics e answer to the current demands. The aim is to invest in holistic, scientifically informed citizen, who are capable of adapting to the demands of the modern society. By providing digital interactive resources, the INTACT project is an asset for both students and teachers, since it allows access to several ideas and suggestions to work on sciences in different contexts and, as such, contribute to significative learning in a bilingual setting.

Our resources are attractive, dynamic and intuitive, thus showing an original and innovative approach meeting children’s and adolescents’ expectations in a language they are used to on their mobile gadgets. The topics approach relevant questions associated with a variety of phenomena belonging to everyday lives, privileging Sciences in the STS perspective (Sciences-Technology-Society-Environment). From the methodological point of view this appears as an essential approach to basic concepts and representations which are a pillar to a more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of Science and Technology. In this way education in sciences supports the increase of literacy in Children and young people.