Abstract:

In December 2009 European Schoolnet (EUN, Belgium), Dum zahranicnich sluzeb MSMT (DZS, Czech Republic) and Direcção Geral de Inovação e Desenvo (DGIDC, Portugal) launched SPICE, a 2-year project funded under the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme (DG Education and Culture), with the aim to establish a Science Pedagogy Innovation Centre for Europe.
The primary objective of this project is to collect, analyze, validate and disseminate innovative pedagogical practice, especially those based on inquiry-based learning whilst enhancing pupil motivation for science studies (at primary/secondary level). SPICE will support this objective by singling out the good practice pedagogies and practices in Maths, Science and Technology, which nowadays are mostly ICT-based, and disseminating them across all Europe. The good practice criteria will allow new projects to have guidelines to ensure their innovation and quality.

SPICE includes 16 participating countries. A teacher panel, along with a science expert panel, defined good practice experiences. 24 projects were selected and they have been tested in the class. Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Biology are represented in the good practices (GP). They are mainly inspired in IBL (Inquiry Based Learning) and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) are intensively used in their development. Each GP will be tested in more than one country, and each teacher will test 3 projects, and will create a report for each project tested.

Some examples of projects are “Earth radius (Eratosthenes’s method) using Geogebra”, “Simulations in Physics class”, “Diffusion”, “Study of inclined plane efficiency” or “Energy consumption-What can we do?”.

Results of those trials will be shared on the occasion of a Summer school organized by DZS in the Czech Republic.

Keywords:

SPICE, IBL, science, good practice, innovation, DG Education, pedagogy, inquiry.