The Pavia University History Museum, which houses historic items mainly connected to the physics and medicine fields, has focused in the past years on new ways to involve its public and to attract new audiences. Among different approaches, digital technologies have proven important to both external and internal communication. Lately, an Augmented Reality application has been made available to visitors, offering in one tool multimedia material of a historical-scientific nature: stories, 3D animations, images and user-generated video storytelling (developed mainly by University students, one of our least present demographics before the App, and younger students, who typically participate in the annual co-creative project). The App was designed to be as non-intrusive and discreet as possible, to preserve the historic ambiance of the museum, to unite social and educational aspects, to register user behaviour and to make the museum experience more vibrant and active and therefore captivating.
The Italian PLS-“Piano Lauree Scientifiche” project has among its objectives the improvement of school-university cooperation, with a special emphasis on in-service teacher professional development. In pursuit of such goal, growing resources and an increasing effort to strengthen the collaboration with schools have been employed in the past years. A working group within the physics section of the PLS project has developed a questionnaire to inquire about teacher formation activities organized during the past five years. After extensive revision and testing, the university network of PLS-Physics was asked to fill the questionnaire. The resulting data from 139 initiatives provides an interesting perspective on the kind of activities, organizational choices and educational priorities for teacher professional development within the PLS-physics project.
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