Firstly, one of our nice teachers from the pilot has asked me to help publicise another ‘webchats with scientists’ project:-

Xperimania organise free webchats with leading scientists and the next english language chat is in January (details below).

(Petro)Chemicals – who needs them?

Try it out – are you able to live a week or even a day without using or coming into contact with petrochemicals? British science journalist Andy Brice took up the challenge and will share his experience with students on the next Xperimania chat “(Petro)chemicals – who needs them?” on 20 January 2009 at 11.00 CET.

Petrochemicals are the building blocks for most modern materials. Many of the objects you use, handle or wear daily could not be produced without them. Andy’s challenge wasn’t that easy to win.

After graduating in journalism, Andy Brice worked as a reporter on electrical engineering magazines Electrical review and Electrical Times in the UK. In 2004 Andy joined ICIS Chemical Business (formerly European Chemical News) as a Markets Reporter. Currently he is working in ICIS as Markets Editor, responsible for the pricing pages and writing news and features. He is also a regular contributor to ICIS TV and ICIS radio.

Living without polypropylene for a week – Cold turkey by Andy Brice (Source: ICB 14.5.2008)

Interested in taking part in the Xperimania online chat (in English)? Schools can register by sending an email to xperimania@eun.org  with the subject line “Xperimania chat”.

Further information

Do you think other teachers who’ve been involved with IAS might be interested in taking part, and could you perhaps spread the word over the blog?

Dan Hannard

Much as we loved all of the teachers who took part, we did have a particular soft spot for Dan as he and his class from Woodkirk High were such fun. Partly because his class all loved Prof Trev Cox, and insisted on calling him Trevizzle. And partly for Dan’s lame joke during the live chats about how the cat fell off the roof because it’s ‘mu (µ)’ was too small. The joke was followed by a moment’s respectful silence from the AS level students. (Well, virtual silence, chat rooms are a text-based medium, after all.) Then Dan chipped in brightly, “You’ll think that’s really hilarious next year, once you’ve done coefficients of friction!”. It’s nice to see a teacher who’s still got such a hopeful outlook, isn’t it?

Another project which I wanted to let you know about is Planet SciCast. This is run by an old colleague of mine, the irrepressible Jonathan Sanderson, who I worked with years ago on Science Shack.

Planet SciCast is four things:

1. A competition to get children, young people, teachers, parents, science communicators and science/engineering/technology professionals all making short films about practical science.
2. A web resource of all those movies (plus write-ups of the activities, experiments and demonstrations), for the use and amusement of everyone involved, but particularly for schools.
3. A platform for other science engagement projects to share their work with a wider audience.
4. Finally, a discussion about who’s job it is to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with entertaining science related material.

You can make and upload your own science videos – or look at all the ones other people have made.

And finally, I’m going to go to the ASE conference in January. If you’re a science teacher and you’re going to be there (well, even if you’re not a science teacher, but I don’t know why you’d be going to the ASE conference if you weren’t…) then let me know and we’ll arrange to meet up. I’ll be there on Thursday 8th Jan. I won’t know anyone, so could you pretend to be my friends?:-)