What you can find in natuurkunde.nl
At the occasion of the GIREP conferences, a few articles and tutorials on the natuurkunde.nl-website have been translated into English. They contain links into the website where you will find the typical natuurkunde.nl-content: articles, interactive tutorials, suggestions and downloads for lab and fieldwork research, exercises, biographies or descriptions of physicists, institutes and companies, and links to all relevant websites of Faculties of Physics or Science in the Netherlands. These pages are fairly well accessible to non-Dutch readers, since much of the content consists of images, Flash and Java applets, animations, small films and mathematical formulas. You will certainly have an impression.
Descriptions of units:
Sound
Medical Imaging
Superconductivity
Typical components of a unit on computational physics:
Model of a free fall
Critical properties of Alkanes
Goals and means
The website aims at the promotion of the image of physics and physicists among the general public, with the emphasis on secondary school students. It is hoped that the website will contribute to increasing the number of students choosing a study in physics or a physics related subject.
Repeated market investigations with panels of secondary school students confirm that the choice of an education aimed website meets the students' needs best. They are attracted by exercises, tutorials, suggestions for practical work (as a part of their school examination), information on study and profession and a facility for asking questions. The website offers the students the help they need, and at the same time it provides many links to articles on recent research and development activities, and to portraits of people working on these.
To date the website contains a large amount of content in the form of (among others):
- articles
- interactive tutorials
- exercises with exam questions
- the entire collection of smaller and larger exercises
- exercises based on newspaper reports
- suggestions and downloads for practical exercises
- suggestions and downloads for examination's research projects
- portraits of (former) physicists
- links to all relevant websites of Science Faculties in the Netherlands
- a bank for individual questions, answered by secondary school teachers and university students
- a FAQ-bank (recently extended, new categories will be completed in September 2006)
Navigation is supported by a variety of searching approaches:
Involvement of teachers
Teachers form an important intermediate group for the website in order to reach the students. And the website is a valuable support for teachers, both for their lessons and for the preparation of lessons. For teachers' convenience, many of the items listed above are collected in thematic units (e.g. "Sound" or "Medical Imaging"), teaching letters and teaching ideas. Under construction is a weblog facility that helps teachers to make their own, daily refreshable, anthology of items from the web site, to which they can add their own favoured links. This is an upbeat to the embedding of natuurkunde.nl in Electronic Learning Environments. Statistics show that many links from referring sites come from the few ELE's that already include natuurkunde.nl.
Statistics
The number of website visits on a working day is on average 2800, with peaks up to 4400. Development of a new national physics curriculum has just started and all new materials will be published on natuurkunde.nl. The Stichting natuurkunde.nl as the site owner is, together with educational publishers, working on a plan to use the site as a common, pre-competitive basis for web and paper based curriculum materials.
Sponsors, organisation and history
In the year 2000, the Dutch Physics Association (Dutch acronym NNV) took the initiative to create a website for communication of the community of physicists with young people, aimed at the promotion of the image of physics and physicists. In 2001, a business plan was discussed with potential sponsors. All Dutch science faculties, the NNV itself, the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) and the Physica Foundation were committed as sponsors. An independent foundation was established, the Stichting natuurkunde.nl, administering the sponsor resources and supervising the quality of the website. The Stichting natuurkunde.nl has contracted the AMSTEL Institute (Universiteit van Amsterdam) and the Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (Universiteit Utrecht) to develop and maintain the website. The AMSTEL Institute is responsible for the project management.
Chair of the website owner, Stichting natuurkunde.nl: prof. dr. Hans Roosendaal;
Chief Editor: prof. dr. Dave Blank;
Project Manager: drs. Jan Lepeltak.
