News & Events

Newsletter #1

17 December 2021

Welcome To Our Newsletter #1

A warm welcome to our very first Newsletter! Our aim is to keep you informed about Playing with Protons Goes Digital, an Erasmus+ EU funded project that brings together five institutes from Italy, Greece, Spain, and the UK with a proven track record and passion for bringing innovation into the science classroom of tomorrow, thereby responding effectively to the newly created circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

In this issue:

  • Meet our Project Coordinator, Dr. Pierluigi Paolucci, Senior Particle Physicist at INFN and CERN, who shares the background and vision of our project and how it can be best achieved.
  • Get to know the Playing with Protons Goes Digital Partnership and our National Contacts.
  • Explore STEAM ONLINE, our regular section highlighting selected STEAM activities, resources and tools for teachers and students. In this issue we highlight VIRAL PASSION, an immersive virtual exhibition on the world of viruses.
  • Don’t miss our news and calendar of forthcoming events.

We hope that you will find our Newsletter both informative and enjoyable and that you, our readers, will feel free to share it with those you think may benefit from knowing about our exciting journey towards an open and digitally resilient science classroom.

 


 

Rossella Parente & Angelos Alexopoulos

Newsletter Editors

Table of contents

Editorial

The last two years have profoundly altered our lives in countless ways, from public health to the economy, as the world has been dramatically challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Education has not been an exception. According to UNESCO, as of mid-April 2020, 1.5 billion children and youth were affected from school closures in 195 countries. While this figure has since been dropping, many teachers and schools are still tested to their Iimits to keep offering high-quality hybrid teaching, while being challenged to continue providing accessible and engaging science learning experiences in collaboration with outreach programs offered by large research institutes, science centres and universities.

I genuinely believe that an important part of a scientist’s work is sharing openly the outcomes of their research to the public, and especially engaging the future generations with the wonderful world of science, technology, engineering and math. At INFN we have long been committed to promote science and how scientists work among the public and especially young people. In 2016, and in the framework of the successful CREATIONS EU project, we launched Art & Science across Italy, an education and outreach programme aimed at engaging high-school students with science by combining the languages of art and science, two of the highest expressions of human creativity. The positive impact of this programme on students’ science motivation and creativity, as documented in a recently published paper, gave us confidence to respond proactively and responsibly to the “new normal”.

The European Commission has been an important ally in the effort to respond proactively to the educational challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In August 2020, following a revision of the Erasmus+ 2020 Annual Work Programme, it announced to provide €100 million to support projects aimed at increasing digital education readiness as well as safeguarding the inclusive nature of digital learning opportunities. This has resulted in a new wave of Erasmus+ funded projects in school education across Europe.

Playing with Protons Goes Digital, a project that I have the honour and pleasure to coordinate from June 2021 to May 2023, is part of this wave. In response to the extraordinary Erasmus+ call for digital education readiness, we have brought together a team composed of prominent informal science education and outreach providers in Italy (INFN, Città della Scienza), the R&D Department of a school of excellence in Greece that is a leading pioneer in innovative approaches to teaching, learning and teacher professional development (Ellinogermaniki Agogi), a renowned UK university with a proven track record in particle physics education and outreach (University of Birmingham), and an innovative company in Spain specialized in empowering the human development through Deep-Tech such as Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality (CreativiTIC).

Our mission is to help bridge the gap between formal, non-formal, and informal science learning by connecting schools with research institutes, science centres, and universities for co-designing STEAM activities inspired from big ideas in science that meet the digital needs, interests and habits of Gen-Z students amidst changing circumstances. Our work is to support teachers to develop their digital capacity and leadership that will enable them to continue providing their students with more interactive and immersive STEAM learning experiences during and post COVID-19 times. Working together with teachers, we will pilot carefully crafted digital resources and activities, utilising mainly Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, in 50 primary and secondary schools across four countries over the next two years. Based on the expert opinion and feedback of teachers, we will finally produce a roadmap offering guidelines and policy recommendations for sustainable pathways towards more engaging, creative, and open science classrooms.

It is this mix of different and complementary skills and expertise that will enable our partnership to support effectively the development of the digital capacity and leadership of teachers and educators to continue providing students with more interactive and immersive STEAM learning experiences during and post COVID-19 times.

On behalf of the project partners, I very much look forward to working with teachers and other key stakeholders across Italy, Greece, Spain and the UK. Our team is ready to support them to apply, reflect on, and share their experiences to help improve the design of hybrid STEAM learning environments that can benefit not only from smart technologies but also the added value of combining formal with non-formal and informal science learning.

It only remains for me to wish you to stay healthy and safe, and I am sure that we will meet each other, in person or virtually, in our forthcoming activities and events.

And don’t forget that this is only the beginning of an exciting journey and opportunity for the creation of something special, attractive, accessible, and of significant benefit to the European teaching community.

 

Dr. Pierluigi Paolucci
Project Coordinator

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Meet Our Partnership

Playing with Protons Goes Digital brings together an international consortium of partners with a proven track record and passion for bringing innovation into the classroom.  Working together with teachers and educators, we aim to excite both primary and secondary students through STEAM activities inspired by Big Ideas in Science, carefully scaffolded with Augmented Reality to foster creativity-enhanced inquiry-based science teaching and learning.

The project is coordinated by the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and involves four more partners from Greece, Italy, Spain and UK.


The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) is the Italian Research Agency dedicated to the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the laws that govern them. INFN is under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). It conducts theoretical and experimental research in the fields of subnuclear, nuclear and astroparticle physics. INFN also contributes to the training of high-school students, through scholarships, internships, and teacher professional development on an annually basis. In addition, INFN is very active in outreach activities by organising and participating in national and international initiatives. These include the “Radiolab”, “OCRA” and “Art & Science across Italy” projects as well as the “Particle Physics Masterclasses”. INFN counts around 2,000 employees, and an additional 3,600 researchers affiliated with other national and international institutions using the INFN facilities, as associate members. INFN has established collaborations and agreements with research institutions from more than 30 countries across five continents.
Ellinogermaniki Agogi (EA) is a school in the greater area of Athens, Greece. Its Research and Development (R&D) Department focuses on the design, implementation, and support of pedagogical and technological innovation in educational practice, through work within the school and through national, European and international collaborations with numerous educational and research institutions.
In more than 20 years of activity, EA’s R&D team has coordinated or been involved in numerous national and international collaborative projects, networks and initiatives, which have established EA as a leading pioneer in innovative approaches to learning, teaching and teacher professional development, especially in connection to science education and educational technology.
Fondazione Idis-Città della Scienza is a non-profit organisation that has among its founding members the Nobel Prize Laureates Rita Levi Montalcini and Carlo Rubbia. It boasts a number of scientific collaborations with major museums and scientific Institutions in Europe and worldwide.
Città della Scienza started its activities in 1987 in the western part of Naples, with a structure dedicated to the dissemination of scientific and technological culture, as well as to the innovation of the educational and business systems. Educational and training activities are realized in connection with the regional and national system of research and university, Città della Scienza is an accredited institution by the Ministry of Education for the implementation of innovative school programs.
CreativiTIC is a SME founded in 2011 and located in Spain. CTIC has experience as R&D partner in FP7 and Horizon 2020 programs using Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The company, identified as key innovator by the Innovation Radar program of the EC, is specialized in empowering the human development through Immersive Technologies and Artificial Intelligence. CreativiTIC manages the Immersive Technologies Experimental Lab ‘URBANLAB’ located in Bilbao (Basque Country), an output of the Urban Innovation Action, Bilbao AsFabrik (BAF). CTIC provides AR/VR educational digital tools and pedagogical methodologies to be used by students and teachers in the field of interactive technology activities and gamification under the Mixed Reality platform AugmentedClass and the Video Games accelerator Gate8.
The University of Birmingham is a leading research-intensive higher education institution in the United Kingdom. The breadth of research expertise is one of its distinctive characteristics: 87% of the University’s research has a global impact according to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), while it is ranked 87th in the 2021 QS world university rankings.
The School of Physics and Astronomy consists of over 120 academic and research staff, along with 120 graduate students and about 50 technical / clerical support staff. It has a very active outreach programme particularly in Astronomy and Particle Physics.

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Meet your National Contacts

Do you want to be part of the Playing with Protons Goes Digital community of teachers and educators? Our National Contacts are ready to support you to take part in the project’s activities that will be organised in your country and beyond.

Pierluigi Paolucci
Project Coordinator and National Contact in Italy
National Institute for Nuclear Physics
pierluigi.paolucci@na.infn.it

I am a senior physicist at INFN (Naples section) and CERN. My research focuses on high energy physics, a field I have been working on for more than 30 years. Before my current position at INFN, I was a fellow at Stanford University and CERN.

Since 2012, I am a member of the CMS experiment, one of the two Large Hadron Collider experiments that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. I am also actively involved in education and outreach. Since 2016, I act as the Italian representative of CERN’s Teachers and Students Forum. I am also the national coordinator of Art & Science across Italy, a national-level STEAM programme for high-school students that is currently on its 3rd edition. Besides my role as Coordinator of Playing with Protons Goes Digital, I will also be the contact person for Italian teachers interested in taking part in the project.

Rossella Parente
National Contact in Italy
Città della Scienza
parente@cittadellascienza.it

I am a researcher and project manager at the Education Department of Fondazione Idis–Città della Scienza. My work is focusing on implementing and experimenting physics activities, researching new approaches, and carrying out teacher training activities for promoting scientific citizenship and social inclusion through social innovation. I also carry out national and European projects on science education and communication, and I have lectured on these subjects at conferences.

My current research activity is on the use of smartphones as high-performance minicomputers in science teaching. I teach physics educational activities to pre-service primary school teachers in a university laboratory course. In this project, I collaborate to create engaging and inspiring activities that combine STEAM and new technologies to disseminate the project’s outputs, including the roadmap for bridging the gap between science and society in order to bring science out of the lab into the classroom through an open engagement with schools, citizens, and societal actors. In addition, I will be the contact person for Italian teachers interested in taking part in the project.

Angelos Alexopoulos
National Contact in Greece
Ellinogermaniki Agogi
alexopoulos@ea.gr

I am a Senior Researcher and Project Manager at Ellinogermaniki Agogi. I have previously worked as an Education and Outreach Officer at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab, where I designed, implemented, evaluated, and coordinated several physics education projects, such as Playing with Protons, a continuous professional development course for primary teachers.

Central to my career has been the thirst to develop sustainable science learning pathways, create synergies between formal and informal education providers, and assist teachers in their efforts to make wonder, creativity and openness indispensable parts of school science education.

My main role in this project is to co-design together with my collaborators the online platform that will offer teachers access to high-quality digital resources as well as support in designing their own AR-based innovative content and activities. In addition, I will be the contact person for Greek teachers interested in taking part in the project.

Jorge R. López Benito
National Contact in Spain
CreativiTIC
jrlopez@creativitic.es

I am a lecturer in Interactive Multimedia (AR/VR) and Videogames at Deusto University in Spain, and also the CEO of CreativiTIC, a SME focused on the research and development of AR/VR digital products, especially in the areas of education and STEAM. I am the author of several books, publications and patents in these areas and I have been involved in different R&D FP7 and H2020 projects during the last years; being named ‘Key Innovator in Augmented Reality & Deeper Learning Technologies’ by European Commission.

Since 2019, I am assisting the European Commission and the RIF (National R&D+i Funding Agency of Cyprus) as an Independent Expert Evaluator. My main role in this project is to provide AR knowledge and technology through our “AugmentedClass!” platform, which allows teachers to create Augmented Reality content without code in a very simple way. In addition, I will be the contact person in Spain for teachers interested in participating in the project.

Konstantinos Nikolopoulos
National Contact in the UK
University of Birmingham
physics.outreach@contacts.bham.ac.uk

I am a Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham. My research focuses on particle physics and I was strongly involved in the Higgs boson discovery with the ATLAS experiment. Currently, I am aspiring to complete our understanding of mass generation for matter through studies of the Higgs boson properties and searches for additional Higgs bosons. Furthermore, I am trying to discover the particle nature of Dark Matter which accounts for 85% of the matter of the universe.

I am interested in inspiring the new generations of scientists and citizens, and I have developed activities combining arts and science for which I was honoured with the, inaugural, 2020 Public Engagement with Research Award by the European Research Council.

In the Playing with Protons Goes Digital project, I aspire to translate my experience with hands-on arts-based science activities in the era of Augmented Reality. I will also be the contact person for UK teachers interested in taking part in the project.

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Steam Online

STEAM ONLINE is dedicated to highlight initiatives, events, resources and tools that our editorial team has selected from the Playing with Protons network, with the aim to keep our readers up to date on current trends in the STEAM field. We hope that our suggestions will be particularly useful to teachers by combining in-school practice with out-of-school learning activities that can enhance students’ goal setting, motivation and interest in science learning.

Viral Passion

Until recently, the word “viral” was mostly associated with the language of the Internet: “a viral video”, “a viral post”, “it’s been viral on social media”, etc. But since the explosion of the coronavirus pandemic, the term has regained its original meaning, rekindling everyone’s attention to the smallest living things known to science, and yet powerful enough to hold the entire planet in their sway.

 

Inspired by the current pandemic crisis, VIRAL PASSION is a 360°virtual visit to the world of viruses. Organised by Città della Scienza, this immersive virtual exhibition introduces visitors, through captivating images, into the viruses behind the main diseases in human history. It also offers visitors a rich pool of reliable online resources, so that everyone can design their individual learning path by cutting through the noise of fake news, hoaxes and misinformation that, unfortunately, the Internet is scattered with.

More info: www.passionevirale.it/EN/

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News Calendar

Webinar with Italian teachers

11 November 2021

Teachers of mathematics, science and technology from all over Italy participated in a webinar organized jointly by INFN and Città della Scienza on 11 November 2021 as part of the 20th edition of the “3 Giorni per la Scuola”. This year’s thematic title was “Rebuilding a new school after the pandemic”. Participants had the chance to meet Pierluigi Paolucci (INFN), get introduced to the project and presented with STEAM good practices, including the Art & Science across Italy initiative, organized by INFN and CERN. Now in its 3rd edition, Art & Science across Italy continues successfully to promote the scientific culture among young people by combining the languages of art and science, representing one of the flagship activities of Playing with Protons Goes Digital.

Inspiring case studies consistent with the RRI framework that combine science, art and new technologies, were also shared by Rossella Parente (Città della Scienza). The thread that binds a Magritte’s famous painting and the notorious blue light from digital devices was investigated together with the help of free online apps and resources. A virtual journey to Murlo, a tiny Italy village, which combines art and technology creating a widespread museum of augmented reality, was also presented and very much appreciated by participants.

The webinar ended with a Q&A session, followed by announcing the next meeting with teachers, scheduled for the first quarter of 2022 as part of the project’s series of multiplier events.

International day for the elimination of violence against women

25 November 2021

The United Nations General Assembly has designated November 25th as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The date is based on the assassination of the three Mirabal sisters and political activists in the Dominican Republic on the same day back in 1960, as was ordered by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujiillo. The premise of the day is to raise awareness of the fact that women around the world are still subject to rape, domestic violence and other forms of physical and psychological violence.

We, at Playing with Protons Goes Digital, are fully committed to the principles and practice of Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) key action of the ‘Science with and for Society’ objective of the European Commission. RRI includes not only multi-actor and public engagement in research and innovation and easier access to scientific results, but also the take up of gender and ethics in the research and innovation content and process, including both formal and informal science education. We, therefore, are strong proponents of the notion that gender equity extends beyond the “school walls”. And that is why November 25th also reminds us that gender issues in science and science careers are part of the wider agenda for gender equity.

Find out more about gender equality in science by visiting UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics dedicated website for women in science. You can also visit the WomanStats Project that currently has the largest cross-national compilation of data, statistics, and maps on the status of women worldwide.

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Forthcoming events

Playing with Protons Goes Digital Multiplier Events

During the first quarter of 2022, the project will reach out to its main target group (i.e., teachers) through a series of Multiplier Events organised in Italy, Greece, Spain and the UK.

Given that collaborating with teachers is at the heart of the project’s approach, these events are designed with the aim to not only share the Playing with Protons Goes Digital project to teachers, but more importantly to get their constructive feedback on the project’s proposed activities. Teachers will, therefore, be invited to simulate sessions and classes using elements from the project’s methodology and exemplary STEAM activities inspired by Big Ideas in Science, enhanced with Augmented Reality content.

Prior to each event, participants will receive support material to help them make the most of their participation.

Those interested in taking part are encouraged to get in touch with their National Contacts. More information will also be available soon on our website.

Playing with Protons Goes Digital Summer School 2022

We are glad to announce that we are holding a Summer School for school heads and teachers!

As part of the annual training courses organised by the European School Innovation Academy, the Playing with Protons Goes Digital Summer School will take place from 3 to 8 July 2022 at Golden Coast Hotel & Bungalows, an A-class/ 4-star sea-side hotel which stretches on the golden, sandy beach of the Marathon Bay, near the historic location of Marathon, at the outskirts of Athens, Greece.

The objectives of the summer school are to provide participants the opportunity to:

  • Understand the context of creative science teaching methodologies adapted to the “new normal” by taking into account the cultural and environmental parameters that affect science teaching and learning in diverse settings;
  • Become familiar with and test novel arts-based creative methodologies and innovative ICT tools, such as student friendly AR activities and games;
  • Learn how to create science learning scenarios inspired by Big Ideas in Physics that align with the curriculum requirements and that the teachers consider to be suitable for local adaptation;
  • Network with colleagues and peers across Europe to establish collaborative school projects that last the test of time;
  • Join a European network of excellence in science education comprised of teachers, adult trainers, teacher trainers, scientists and other key stakeholders;
  • Expand their continuous professional development opportunities.

Interested in taking part? If yes, please visit the Summer School website. In it you will find important information on how to secure full funding by applying for an Erasmus+ KA1 School Education Mobility Grant. Please note that the Erasmus+ KA1 application can only be submitted by the school or the organization – no individual applications can be submitted.

The deadline for applications is 23 February 2022.

Need help with the application process? Please get in touch with your National Contacts who will be happy to guide you through the process.

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