National Awards Scheme 1998 winners

Successful applicants in the 1998 round

1. Dr Roger Barlow, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Schuster Laboratory, Manchester University, Manchester, M13 9PL

Tel 0161 275 4178 Fax 0161 273 5867 email roger.barlow@man.ac.uk

(together with a consortium of scientists and teachers from Manchester, Bristol, Lancaster, Oxford and Brunel Universities and Simon Langton School in Canterbury).

£50,000 for ‘Building the Universe: The National Particle Physics Institute’. This is a training scheme for teachers of A-level physics, delivered as one-week residential courses at Manchester and Bristol each June/July after national exams are over. There will be a mix of lectures, workshops and practical activities, centred on the ideas of particle physics in the new, post-Dearing, A-level syllabus. The demand from teachers is very high, and at each site there will be 100 teachers and 5 lecturers. The lecture modules will cover five areas: Fundamentals (relativity and wave-particle duality); The Elements (quarks, leptons and forces); Putting It Together – hadrons, interactions and decays; The Universe (from the Big Bang to today); and The Hardware – particle accelerators and detectors.

2. Dr Martin Barstow, Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH.

Tel 0116 252 3492 Fax 0116 252 3311 email mab@star.le.ac.uk|

(together with a consortium including staff from the School of Education, Leicester; the National Space Science Centre; the Millennium Satellite Centre Ltd; Roehampton Institute; and the University of Surrey).

£70,000 towards ‘Classroom Space – a national project for ages 11-16’. The project is to develop classroom activities in space science and astronomy, by drawing on education programmes being developed by the partners and extending their benefits through school visits, teacher-training workshops and on-line electronic media. A goal is to make real space and astronomy data accessible to schools from the archives of current and future space missions. There will be five classroom modules for 11-16 year olds, and dissemination of the project material will be via the National grid for Learning, the MSCL Website and CD-ROM. Planned module titles include Comet/Asteroid Rendezvous, Return to the Moon, Mission to Mars, Mission Earth and Solar Weather.

3. Dr Margaret Penston, Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 OHA.

Tel 01223 374768 Fax 01223 374769 email mjp@ast.cam.ac.uk|

(Together with a consortium including the Association for Science Education, Hatfield, and Anglia Multimedia Ltd, Norwich)

A contribution of £30,000 towards ‘HandsOnUniverse II’, an educational project for 11-16 year olds. This extends the previous ‘HandsOnUniverse’ pack for 7-11 year olds, which addressed the Earth & Space syllabus points in the National Curriculum (NC) at Key Stage 2. The new project supports NC Key Stages 3 and 4 ‘The Earth and Beyond’ topics, and will contain a fully interactive CD-ROM , a 48 page booklet, posters, and a supporting Website. It will also support the Scottish curriculum primary 7 to secondary 2 ‘Earth in Space’ and Standard Grade ‘Space Physics’ topics. Links will be sought to the coming ‘Faulkes’ remote telescope (to be used for PUS and educational purposes).