Germany is represented in the project with two partners, the IPN Leibniz Institute of Science and Mathematics Education in Kiel, and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It’s not only the pure distance of 900 km, it’s also significant differences in school system and curricula, as well as dialect. Not to mention the different relatedness of students to the topic of ocean. 

To bridge this gap and to get the CoL to a similar starting position for developing the module, two three-day workshops were organized.

The first workshop, held October 1st to 3rd in Kiel, was focused on oceanography. Visiting the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, one of the leading ocean research institutes worldwide as start of the workshop offered a broad view on the topic. The next day, a visit to the ocean lab of the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt brought contact to student activities and experiments. The start of the last day was in the sign of business games, introducing the game “Energetingen” and discussing options of adapting this to ocean topics and RRI. In between the fixed program tasks, a lot of time for discussions offered the possibility to create the frame for the module.

 
The German CoL at work.

The second workshops focus was on exhibition and held at Deutsches Museum in Munich from November 29th to December 1st. The first day provided an insight into various ways of presenting scientific topics in exhibitions / museums, e.g. a tour through the new exhibition Ocean and Deep See Research, as well as the Center of New Technologies, that contains many RRI elements. The second day provided time to discuss the current state of the submodules. On the last day a tour to the museums workshops was scheduled, as well as a report from the IRRESISTIBLE Lisbon Exhibition Workshop and a workshop on how to create student exhibitions with the EXPOneer system. 

The different school systems and curricular frameworks were a huge challenge for developing a joint module. Especially the different time spans available were problematic: in the Bavarian school system (Munich), several hours in different subjects were available, in Schleswig-Holsteins school system (Kiel), a compulsory optional subject was targeted with two hours a week over half a year. To target this challenge, several submodules were developed, that could either be taught in several subjects (Bavaria), or as a sequence in one subject (Schleswig-Holstein). To make it easy for students to tie all these contents from different subjects together, an IRRESISTIBLE branded folder was introduced to collect all info and work sheets.

 
Left: Hands-On ocean (Baltic Sea). Right: The IRRESISTIBLE OCEAN folder for students to collect all material of their module.