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EWOC Conference Write Up: Day 2 Tuesday 4th July 2006.

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Ollie Bray

Monday 10 July 2006

American Independence Day and a public holiday in the USA. Due to the holiday, today was a half day at the conference based at the Millennium Hotel (where most of the conference delegates were staying).

The morning was split into two parts. The first part was the poster presentation. There were 36 posters on display (although we quickly noticed that ours was the biggest!) about various projects around the world. Lots of the posters looked really interesting but I didn’t really get a chance to look around as ours was sparking a lot of interesting and we spent a couple of hours working hard talking about our projects, giving out business cards (with the exc-el web address on them), showing off Victoria and Georges ‘Science of the Weather’ Book and demonstrating the GEOCASTS project on a couple of Ipods.

After the poster presentations we went into a practical workshop that looked at some strategies for teaching practical hands on metrology. Some of these techniques our covered in the ‘Science of the Weather’ and some of the techniques were new to me or involved too much equipment to be demonstrated in a standard geography classroom.

However the ideas have certainly got me thinking. One of the things that I believe put off geography teachers from doing simple science experiments in their classes is the lack of materials and the complicated written instructions that are often associated with such experiments. I think there is scope to put together a number of short high quality video clips demonstrating some of the experiments. I believe this would help teachers visualise how simple yet effective these experiments are to a class of children.

My favourite activity that I saw was Ann Kelly’s ‘Cotton Clouds’. Aimed at primary school children, the activity used cotton wool, paper and glue to make a cloudscape. Simple but fantastic.

During the morning I had been talking to people about Wiki’s and a took a couple of minutes before lunch to help Malcolm Walker (The Education Officer for the Royal Metrological Society) set up a Wikipedia page for Met Link International.

A Forth of July BBQ followed the morning’s workshop. In the afternoon David Smith (The Conference Organiser) was kind enough to take us for a drive up into the mountains to see a bit of the countryside. On the way home we stopped in Golden for a pint at the Buffalo Rose Pub. Great place with lots of atmosphere. Although I’m not a great fan of larger I opted for a pint of Coors after all the Coors Brewing Company is based in Golden. It would be like going to Dublin and ordering a Bacardi breezer!

In the evening we watched the 4th of July Fireworks.

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