“MOBILE PHONE TEACHING KIT”: CONNECTING GEOSCIENCES AND EVERYDAY APPLICATIONS BY PROVIDING A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR NATURAL SCIENCE TEACHERS

Modern educational tools combining research science with applications are required to attract more and highly skilled future scientists. In 2002, the American based teaching tool “GEOLAB” was successfully adapted by the Austrian Geological Society Museum and the Museum of Natural History in Vienna with more than one thousand sold copies. A previous educational outreach component developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology within the framework of “EarthTime” shows that hands-on-learning experiences enhance conceptual understanding and long-term learning effects of even complex topics. Taken together, both outreach efforts suggest that classroom-geoscience teaching tremendously benefits from structurized, prepared lesson plans in combination with hands-on material. Thus, during the past months, we have started to develop a classroom-teaching kit that implements interdisciplinary exercises and modern geoscientific application for high-school students. This “Mobile Phone Teaching Kit” analyzes the components of mobile phones and emphasizes their mineral compositions. By combining everyday uses and applications with geoscientific knowledge we will attract future science generations interested in Earth Sciences. It is aimed at classroom teaching and the kit comes with a structurized and prepared lesson plan that can easily be adapted to school curricula. Our proposed funding for the material kit reaches out to approx. 90 schools (10 schools in each of the 9 federal states in Austria).