ACTIVITIES REPORT
Partners' Institution:
Technical University of Gabrovo
Project's period (from/to):
01 March 2010 - 02 January 2011
WPs concerned:
WP 7 - Dissemination

Objectives of activities carried out:
Evaluation of project's activities connected with producing of educational packages
Possible partnership

Seminar within the frame of the 10th International Scientific Conference UNITECH’10 -Gabrovo.

Time period:
19.11.2010

Description of activities carried out:
WP 7. Dissemination

Seminar “Education in Chemistry in Technical Universities” within the frame of the 10th International Scientific Conference UNITECH’10 was held on Friday, 19.11.2010. The seminar was organized by the Department of Chemistry and Ecology (Technical University of Gabrovo) in the frame of "Chemistry is all around us project". 13 lecturers from Universities and High technical schools in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ukraine and Turkey attended the seminar. Practices, approaches and educational technologies in teaching chemistry as a part of the fundamental education in Universities were discussed. Problems as the lack of appropriate equipment, books and ICT-based products were mentioned as a main reason for the bad students’ motivation in learning chemistry. Attendance in International scientific conference and dissemination of project's results

Informational article about the project was published on the official site of STELLA - an interactive and multilingual web portal for all people involved in science education who want to communicate experiences, cooperate, exchange ideas and thoughts on teaching methods and approaches.
The website of STELLA gives an opportunity to present our project to colleagues from all over Europe, to share the project’s results and, that way, to cooperate with teachers from other countries by making use of the set of multimedia tools for transferability developed to facilitate the exchange of practices and the transfer of results.



WP.7.1

The project "Chemistry is All Around Us" was added to project database of European Network for Transfer and Exploitation of EU Project Results (E.N.T.E.R.).

The E.N.T.E.R. is a non-profit association officially registered in Austria and was founded to serve four main purposes:
• To support European Union strategies through the dissemination and valorisation of project results funded by European programmes for the benefit of all European citizens.
• To offer EU project coordinators the opportunity to disseminate information about their projects and their results to a broad community of interested organisations and bodies.
• To give European citizens and organisations the opportunity to receive information regularly about developments and results in the EU project community.
• To give interested organisations the opportunity to find EU project groups and consortia for exchanging knowledge and developing innovative project ideas

Outcomes:
Academic lecturers came to the conclusions that although some differences in educational systems and the educational content, there are some common problems in teaching chemistry and they reflect directly on the quality of educational process and, finally, cause a persistent tendency of decreased students motivation in learning chemistry as one of the fundamental subject in technical education.
Some useful practices in academic education and teaching chemistry were presented and discussed

Evaluation of the work undertaken:
The seminar became a forum to share problems, tendencies and good practices in academic education and particularly in chemistry. A possible partnership and useful collaboration in future projects between the Universities presented at the seminar was discussed.

Published information will enlarge the number of people interested in chemistry learning and will facilitate the access to educational packages provided by the project’s portal.

Discussions held with students will help us to find the right approaches to increase the students' motivation in learning chemistry.

The website of STELLA gives an opportunity to present our project to colleagues from all over Europe, to share the project’s results and, that way, to cooperate with teachers from other countries by making use of the set of multimedia tools for transferability developed to facilitate the exchange of practices and the transfer of results.