RESEARCH www.rsc.org/cerp | Chemistry Education Research and Practice Make sense of nanochemistry and nanotechnology Paola Ambrogi, a* Monica Caselli, b Marco Montalti c and Margherita Venturi c Received 20th January 2007, Accepted 5th December 2007 First published on the web 28th January 2008 DOI: 10.1039/b801285g A class in a Scientific-Technological Lyceum (age 17) decided to produce a PowerPoint presentation to introduce nanochemistry and nanotechnology to the students in lower grades. Because the subject is very new, there was nothing in the School textbooks and, therefore, the students had to cooperate in order to find materials, to use ICT sources and to take decisions, such as selecting information and choosing slide layouts. Furthermore, the Cooperative Learning methodology was employed to solve the problem of setting up the presentation. To make nanochemistry and nanotechnology a reality for the students, they used a link between these new frontiers of Chemistry and subjects currently tackled at the Secondary School level. This was the quantitative determination of Ca 2+ ions by using calcein, a luminescent chemosensor, in which well known concepts, such as chemical equilibrium and stability constants of coordination compounds, are involved. The educational aims of the project were to promote both content knowledge and social skills in Secondary School students. The activity created a good class atmosphere and also led to the retention of content knowledge. Keywords: situated learning, cooperative learning, social skills, nanotechnology, quantitative analysis Introduction A booklet of the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences (EuCheMS 2006) states: “the chemical and molecular sciences have been fundamental to the current economic and social achievements in Europe, and will continue to be the key underpinning sciences for future European innovation and industrial advances. ” The students, who will be our future society, must learn for tomorrow’s world and so they need a meaningful knowledge of the basic principles of science. The PISA 2003 report (see the web site http://pisacountry.acer.edu.au/ ) showed that Italian students do not perform very well in Science; indeed, they have scored 486 (the average score was 500), which made them 27 th out of 40 countries. Chemistry, like physics and mathematics, is not very popular among our students. Chemistry, in particular, is considered too hard to study, abstract and distant from everyday life. Many students believe they will never have to do anything with Science and Chemistry, or use them outside the school. Therefore, it is important that they understand how the Sciences impact on human life and how it might help in taking decisions concerning social, technological, and economic problems. A good strategy might be, in order to catch the students’ interest and motivate them, to starting with challenging topics at the cutting edge of science. In this article we present a teaching-learning activity based on nanochemistry and nanotechnology. This choice required both the use of new technologies to carry out the activities and a non-traditional approach in teaching-learning methodologies to develop content knowledge and social skills. The topic is unusual and it is not in the curriculum, so Information and Communication Technology (ICT) was indispensable to find and communicate the necessary information. Knowledge is indispensable but it must now be combined with a growing number of new skills in intercultural, computer, linguistic, and ecological fields. In preparing citizens for the future the role that education plays is fundamental. Tarozzi (2005), describing the profile of the ideal graduate of interest to a well-known chemical company, stresses the following abilities: business direction (strategic component), implementation (results), networking/team building, people development, personal leadership characteristics, communication skills. Content knowledge alone seems no longer to be sufficient, and social skills are a must in order to work successfully in a team as our complex society requires. Schools must keep up with cognitive, socio- cultural and technological changes. In this society that evolves so quickly, learning to learn has become a key concept. Starting from these considerations a complex activity was decided on to enhance the students’ capacity to face a complex society. The work involved individual and group activities, decision making, ICT use, practical work in the chemistry laboratory, and numerical exercises. The project was created on the basis of the constructivist theory for learner driven learning. Both traditional face-to-face instruction and the cooperative learning approach were used to carry out the project. a I.T.I.”L. Nobili” Reggio Emilia - SSIS Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia; E-mail: paola.ambrogi@unimore.it b Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, c Università degli Studi di Bologna This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2008 Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2008, 9, 5–10 | 5