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Creative Science: Projects: Make science fun and you'll turn the tide

Posted on: Tuesday, 30 March 2004, 06:00 CST

"First they look at it, trying to get their mind round it, and then the penny drops - this is my DNA." Dr Dominic Delaney, education programme manager for Bio-Rad Laboratories, London, is showing teachers how to use the "genes in a bottle" kit. In under an hour, he says, students can non-invasively extract enough DNA to be able to see it. "It's obviously stringy," he adds. The genes are then sealed inside a glass vial that's made into a necklace. They literally wear their own genes.

The kit opens up a range of teaching opportunities - from discussing the ethics of a DNA database through to understanding cell structure. It's just one of the many new ideas for teaching science creatively.

A report by Sir Gareth Roberts, commissioned by the government and published in 2002, showed that the UK does not have an adequate supply of people with science, technology, engineering and maths skills.

As a result, the government has set up initiatives to increase scientific literacy. These range from the creation of science learning centres (see panel) through to conferences, such as Creativity in Science, which took place last week. The goal is to keep teachers' scientific understanding current and explore new ways of presenting science - an attitude of enquiry that Dr Derek Bell, chief executive at the Association for Science Education (ASE), feels has been affected by tighter health and safety regulations over the past 10-15 years.

Delaney hosted one of the seminars at the Creativity in Science conference, a Department for Education and Skills event supported by the Royal Society. Other exhibitors offered equally exciting ways of presenting science. Working with Liverpool John Moores University, ex-businessman and cosmologist Dill Faulkes has made two telescopes in Hawaii and Australia available to schoolchildren. During a 30- minute time slot, they can control the telescope via the internet.

The telescope facilitates key stages 3 and 4, but the company is working with adults and primary schools. It can either be used as a research tool, allowing students to measure the spiral arms of nebulae in the galaxy, for instance, or as inspiration for English or art lessons. "It matches your Playstation," says Dr Lucie Green, communications manager. "It really shows students that science can be fun."

Following the Roberts review, teachers may now follow up more topical scientific matters in key stage 4, while key stage 3 has a new science strand. To help teachers, the ASE and Sheffield Hallam University have created UPD8, a subscription newsletter, which now has 3,000 teachers using it.

The team picks scientific news stories and turns them into activity sessions linked to stages 3 and 4. For example, one topic focuses on whether caffeine can improve exam performance, while another looks at the human tissue bill currently being discussed in parliament.

Students decide whether organs should be used for medical research without the patient's consent and sub mit their opinions online. "It gets kids interested," says Bell, "and by handling issue- based science carefully and investigating it thoroughly, you start to really get them fascinated so they want to know how things work."

Traditional science is also being given a new twist by organisations such as the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). The institute has suggestions for making physics fun on its website, including building your own particle accelerator, while the RSC helps teachers organise "chemistry at work" sessions. Here students learn from industry, such as the science of sugar at Coca-Cola or chemistry and crime at the Metropolitan Police forensic science laboratory.

It's even possible for students to participate in experiments. The Royal Society offers grants to schools and a scientific partner. Initially, Writhlington school in Bath teamed up with Kew to explore how native bee orchids could be raised from seed and reintroduced where the natural population had been decimated . The school is now one of the largest orchid growers in the country.

Simon Pugh-Jones, the school's science coordinator, says that as a result, "a significant number of students are moving into scientific careers, studying subjects such as ecology, or finding out about careers in horticulture."

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