The Plenary meeting and General Assembly will be held on May 14-17 in Helsinki FI. The final programme is downloadable from thjs section. Please contact (ECTNA) or (ECTN), if you wish to make any suggestions concerning the 2008 Plenary meeting or if you have any items you wish the Management Committee to discuss.

For any information, please contact the local team: 
Download the final Programme (PDF / 93Kb) or look at it on the official website.

The next ECTNA Administrative Council meeting and ECTN Management Committee meeting will take place on September 2008 in Torino IT.

News from the Front ...

EChemTest News

Demo tests
- New translations of demo tests in various languages recently released for correction (in progress):
    General Chemistry: Greek, Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Slovenian
    Inorganic Chemistry: Dutch, Norwegian, Polish
- New templates now in operation allowing the full compatibility of our demo tests (conversion in progress will soon reach 100% of the available tests) with
    = Windows: Internet Explorer, Firefox
    = MacOS: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari

Databases
- General Chemistry 1 in Finnish, now in operation, thanks to the Kristiina Wähälä's Helsinki team
- Organic Chemistry 3 in French in progress for correction, thanks to Peter Gaertner's Organic Chemistry Group Leader
- Physical Chemisry 3 completely reviewed and now available in English, Italian and Spanish, thanks to the Renuncio's Physical Chemistry Group

Testing Center
- Complutense Madrid ES, have now a new team led by Francisco Gavilanes as Supervisor and Joaquin Alcaraz as Administrator.

Contact us at: 

Working Group on "Image of Chemistry" 

Michele Floriano, Palermo IT (E.U.) - April 12, 2008

 

All interested colleagues are kindly reminded that a meeting of the WG on “Image of Chemistry” will take place in Helsinki on Friday, 16 May at 2 pm. Contributions are strongly encouraged and, in particular, those dealing with the evaluation of activities aimed at improving public perception and understanding of Chemistry. An impressive number of “outreach” activities have been organized in recent years throughout Europe and it might be useful to examine the main features making such activities successful based on objective data, In a nutshell, we would like to address the question; “How can you prove that a particular activity is indeed improving in a significant way the Image of Chemistry?” Anyone wishing to contribute with analyses, feedback information and, in general, with ideas useful for the discussion is invited to send an email. Everybody is invited to the WG meeting.
See you in Helsinki.
 

Contact the author: 

Author: Professor Bill Byers, Belfast UK - March 21, 2008; The International Technology, Education and Development Conference was held in Valencia at the Congress Centre in the Hotel Melia Valencia Palace from the 3rd to the 5th March. Some 500 delegates, from 5 continents and over 70 countries, attended the conference. These delegates came from a wide range of disciplines with business, engineering and science being particularly prominent. Nonetheless many of the papers were quite generic and there was much to interest a passing chemist. Industrial placement, employability, pedagogy, emerging technology and motivation were all well represented in the presentations. The programme consisted of five parallel sessions but attendance at presentations was generally good with around 50 delegates attending most talks. The conference was well organised and despite very tight timelines the programme ran well as intended and we barely noticed the arrival of the American team for the World Indoor Athletics Championship at the hotel on day 2 of the conference. There was also a poster room with 4 half-day poster sessions scheduled. However Kristiina Wähälä's EChemTest poster 'flew' proudly throughout the conference. ECTN was well represented at the conference with 4 oral presentations on Bologna process (Aren van der Gen), Eurobachelor®/Euromaster® (Ray Wallace), EChemTest (Pascal Mimero) and Independent Learners (Bill Byers) as well as the afore mentioned poster. A virtual conference presented by Evangelia Varella is also published in the proceedings. Many delegates were no doubt envious of the contributions that ECTN has made to chemistry education as evidenced by the rather doleful question at the end of Pascal's talk on the EChemTest, 'Are there any similar questions banks for subjects other than chemistry?'. In summary the meeting appears to have provided a successful opportunity for disseminating details of ECTN and its activities to a wider audience than usual. Proceedings are published as a printed book (ISBN 978-84-612-0192-1) and an electronic media on CDRom (ISBN 978-84-612-0190-7).

The organizer provided also some figures online at: http://www.iated.org/inted2008/?section=19

Contact the author: 

Author and contact person: Professor Tony Rest, Soton UK - March 31, 2008; What would you expect to see if you walked into a Science classroom in a school in rural Africa or any other developing country Would there be laboratory benches, sinks, running water, distilled water, chemicals, equipment, Bunsen burners, and students with goggles and lab coats? The answer is that you would see ... read online the full article here.

Contact the author: 
School of Chemistry, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom;
Tel: (+44)-(0)-2380-593595 (university office) and (+44)-(0)-2380-472985 (home office)
Website: www.focusbiz.co.uk/chemistry

Contact person: Professor Pavel Drašar, ICT Prague CZ - April 24, 2008; The fourth consecutive congress of European chemists will be organized on August 26-30, 2012 in Prague. The organizers wish to bring together the most important and interesting issues and people from the whole chemical world. Hence they ask all colleagues to show their work in Prague on one side and on the other, not to organize any competitive scientific meetings during the period of August 26-30, 2012. Every ideas and suggestions about program, satellite meetings, topics, slogans, public performances etc. etc. are welcome.

Please write to: 

  19th Symposium on Chemical Education, University of Dortmund DE, May 22-24, 2008
        Promoting Successful Science Education – The Worth of Science Education Research