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 are designed to introduce students 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 through innovation and engineering.
We have developed programmes from infants class through Transition Year that support teachers and students as they discover, engage with and investigate materials and their properties in unique and interesting ways.
Our resources aim to improve teachers and their students’ content knowledge of material science, understanding of materials science and society relationships, build awareness of materials science and STEM careers and develop students’ sense of science identity (being a scientist) facilitating the teaching of science with other subject areas in an integrated manner.
Our resources are developed with and for teachers and teacher educators, to ensure they are age appropriate, based on sound pedagogical practice.
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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