Mairéad Holden
Education and Training Manager
mholden1@tcd.ie
Research Ireland Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research
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Materials science is everywhere and plays an essential role in our lives. From mobile phones and batteries, to water bottles and coffee cups, we use engineered materials everyday. The AMBER Education programmes introduce students from early years to Senior Cycle to the world of materials science and the scientists that are advancing our understanding of these materials as they work toward making our world a better place.
In light of curricular changes in STEM, our programmes for schools are currently being developed by our team. We are delighted to be working with colleagues in COGG to further develop our collection of bilingual STEM resources for Irish-medium settings. We are excited to share these with the education community. Watch this space!
MathScify is an ongoing project (see www.mathscify.org) involving AMBER team members co-designing and translating multilingual STEM assessment tasks for primary and secondary teachers and students. These tasks form part of the MathScify toolkit, designed to assess students’ STEM skills. The toolkit will be used by primary and secondary teachers across Europe and beyond.
In 2025, the AMBER-led Ecnetica project will further develop the MathScify resource bank through the addition of interactive tutorials aimed at upper secondary students. These will be developed by AMBER researchers in collaboration with Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC).
As part of Science Week 2024 AMBER collaborated with An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta (COGG) utilising AMBER Staff and Researchers to make videos explaining their their research work through the Irish Language. Each video is accompanied by a specially prepared “Gluais”/glossary to support children in Irish medium primary schools to engage with STEM terminology that will be new to them. The videos can be viewed below and include contributions from:
AMBER’s Funding Manager Dr Claire McKenna and Researchers: Dr Jhonattan Baez, and Dr Tara Ní Néill.
Accompanying glossaries:
AMBER has a strong emphasis on collaboration. Central to AMBER’s research remit are collaborative projects performed with industry partners, and working with academic, industry and wider stakeholder on international and national research programmes.
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