The first joint staff training event of “Scientify” was held in Sobreda, Portugal between 8th and 12th of November 2021. The programme consisted of valuable and inspiring lectures, workshops, discussions on project examples, observation of Science lessons and feedback sessions.
Teachers from partner schools participated in a lecture on “People and Teams – secrets for a successful project” by Ms. Adelaide Franco, an expert on management and Mindset, teacher of several universities and consultant of 15 schools in Almada, including the hosting school. The training also involved a lecture on “Science in science-fiction movies” by Rui Agostinho, an university teacher of physics with a large experience on disseminating science, especially through non-science movies. For 90 minutes the lecturer browsed several science-fiction movies (“2001. Elysium”, “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, among others) accessing within scientifical frames of physics and maths what was plausible or possible and what was pure entertainment. Without diminishing the importance of entertainment, the lecturer emphasized how deeper pleasure and more meaningful it was watching those movies with a bit of background knowledge about science. The group of participants found this lecture interesting and well-integrated in the theme of the training of the hosting school project.
The hosting school presented the results of the short-term pilot project “Reading Science”. The latter was a warming-up experience of the school in the frame of “Scientify”. Secondary school students of Sciences were challenged to make a review on a book they chose, according to one of the 2 options: Science in books (they would pick a fictional book and would find potential plot events to be addressed in the frame of science, assessing its plausibility) or Books on Science (they would pick a Scientific Outreach book and would make a review based on the science frames of the curricula). The teachers from each school also shared their ideas on short-term interdisciplinary Science projects based on fiction movies such as ”Gattaca”, ”Spider Man”, ,,The Martian”.
The training event has been a fruitful, solid and inspiring beginning and background for the ideas and activities partner schools will implement in their respective schools in December 2021- March 2022.
