SECOND LIFE: A FINE WAY TO SPREAD CHEMISTRY THROUGH THE INTERNET

The scientific literacy of the population is a crucial subject on achieving a better society. Only well informed people can make and assume decisions in a technological world as the one our planet became.
All people dealing with Science intend, or should intend, to pass the obtained knowledge on to other people. Teachers do this in school, professors do this at university, and people do this in any company. However, many people don’t have a place outside their professional environments which is easily accessible and where they can to look up serious, scientifically correct and up to date information about other aspects not covered by their profession. Both authors have been involved for some time in the pursuit of new forms of teaching Chemistry, namely to students, in order to make them more motivated, interested and involved.[1]. Now the intention is to spread this goal to a larger audience. After analysing the already used media (internet sites and Moodle [2]), the future platform to be accessed will be Second Life. There we can reach people of all ages and all kinds of knowledge, who may want to get know better how some important things in their day lives happen (chemistry speaking…) With over 80,000 simultaneous users online at any given time, Second Life is a virtual world with a high impact. The American Chemical Society itself has an Island with its name, where some chemical material is developed [3]. We intend to develop materials for the population in general, written in Portuguese. Those materials would be aggregated in important themes from everybody’s everyday life: carbon and nanotubes, energetic cells, DNA and paternity tests, sugars and insulin, perfumes, and so on. The contents are being produced and as soon as possible they will start to be available in the Second Life platform.