New Perspectives in Science Education
The Interactive “HYPATIA” Tool as a Good Practice Science Education Resource of the “Go-Lab” FP7 European Project
Stylianos Vourakis, University of Athens, Faculty of Physics (Greece)
Christine Kourkoumelis, University of Athens, Faculty of Physics (Greece)
Sofoklis Sotiriou, Head of R and D department, Ellinogermaniki Agogi,Athens (Greece)
Abstract
It has been noted by various reports that during recent years, there has been an alarming decline in young people’s interest in science studies and mathematics. Since it is believed that the traditional teaching methods often fail to foster positive attitudes towards learning science, the European Commission has made intensive efforts to promote science education in schools though new methods based on the inquiry based techniques: questions, search and answers. This should be coupled with laboratories which are very important elements in learning and practicing science.
The “Go-lab - Global Online Science Enquiry Learning at School” an FP7 EC project which started more than two years ago - for a four year duration - aims to put together remote labs, virtual labs and datasets/analysis tools, in order to enhance the resources available to teachers for large scale use in education..
The authors of this abstract have developed the data set/analysis tool “HYPATIA” which can interactively analyze data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN and will be presented in the conference. HYPATA is widely used in schools though out Europe; as an example of good practice, the students “hunt” for the recent Nobel Prize winning Higgs boson.
