Nanotechnology education programme, Swiss Nano-Cube, won an innovation prize at this year’s CeBIT conference held March 6 – 10, 2012. (CeBIT stands for Centrum für Büroautomation, Informationstechnologie und Telekommunikation in German and is world’s largest Information and Communications Technology conference.) From the April 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
The initiative of mid-sized enterprises “Initiative Mittelstand” recently has granted the Innovation Prize IT 2012 at the CeBIT exposition. The platform “Swiss Nano-Cube” was awarded a “Best of 2012” certificate in the category “e-learning”. …
The web platform “Swiss Nano-Cube” is an interactive knowledge and education gateway for micro and nanotechnology for the application in vocational and grammar* school. …
The goal of Swiss Nano-Cube is to awaken interest for technological and natural scientific topics among youth, thus imparting knowledge about practice-relevant knowledge of nanotechnology for apprentices. Although being a key technology with a huge potential and diverse application opportunities, teaching material and education and formation offers for nanotechnology are scarce. Many teachers have not dealt with nanotechnology in their education. Here, Swiss Nano-Cube as European pioneer project bridges a gap and creates great benefits for education and formation.
* I was not able to find any references to grammar schools (grades 1 -7) on the Swiss Nano-Cube website. I suspect this is a translation issue.
From the Swiss Nano-Cube About us page,
Swiss Nano-Cube is the national knowledge and education platform for micro and nanotechnology. It addresses teachers and students from vocational schools, secondary schools as well as higher professional schools.
The aim of the platform is to arouse interest for micro and nanotechnologies among students and young professionals and to provide comprehensive yet understandable information to teachers.
I have yet to see any programmes for teaching nanotechnology or related topics in secondary schools in British Columbia (the province where I live) or in the other provinces; education is under provincial not federal jurisdiction in Canada.
More from the April 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
The layout of the gateway as well as the constituent elements are especially designed for a young audience. This is complemented by exciting learning arrangements, like for example the interactive game “Nanorama Loft”. In a virtual loft diverse nano products from everyday life have to be found and the player has to answer quiz questions.
The “NanoTeachBox” contains didactical teaching and learning materials, ready-to-use, as well as videos, presentations and much more information to be used in school lessons. Teaching and learning material e. g. for nano chemistry, occupational health and nanosilver is available and can be directly applied to lessons. Furthermore, “Swiss Nano-Cube” offers diversified background information on several aspects of nanotechnology drawing a bow from basic effects in the nano world, over economic, social and technological issues to practice-relevant information for work routine. All materials can be downloaded and used for free. Concomitantly, “Swiss Nano-Cube” periodically offers “TeachNano” upgrade training courses for teachers.
It’s an engaging website although you may find German language skills useful once you click further into the site.