The first-ever edition of FuseNet Teacher’s Day, a Europe-wide webinar dedicated to promoting Fusion in high-schools, was held last Friday, October the 2nd. The event brought together teachers from all around Europe, scattered into 18 local sessions across 16 European Countries. Our BSC Fusion group, in cooperation with Fusion for Energy (F4E), the b_TEC Foundation and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), organized the Barcelona local session under the umbrella of the FusionCAT project.
The objective of the webinar was to introduce fusion to high-school teachers and to give them the tools and the knowledge they need in order to introduce fusion in the classrooms. This event was a fantastic opportunity for teachers all around Europe to get first-hand knowledge on one of the biggest science topics of today, directly from Europe’s best experts on the topic.
The Barcelona local session was chaired by Mr Grisha Domakowski, from b_TEC. The session was composed by two talks: First, a general introduction to fusion and magnetic confinement fusion was given by Mr Stravos Chatzipanagiotou from F4E. Thereafter, new classroom material was introduced by two of our group members, Dani Gallart and Jordi Manyer, who gave a talk on the important role fusion can play in high-school programs.
After the local sessions, all participant throughout Europe got together for a joint session, in which fusion experts presented the tokamaks Golem, JET and ITER, with live connections to the machines. The webinar ended with a series of local Q&As, where professors had the chance to interact and discuss all their doubts with our fusion experts.
Overall, the event got very positive feedback from the professors. It is not very often that they have first-hand training on such state-of-the-art subjects, and they were grateful for the opportunity. There is definitely a need for this sort of events. We are glad to say it was also a fantastic experience for our group, and we hope this year’s event is only the first of many to come.
We would like to thank FuseNet for organizing the event, and all participating entities across Europe for committing to the project, with special thanks to our local collaborators from F4E, b_TEC and UPC. We would also like to thank all the teachers who made this possible by participating to this event.
See you next year!
The Barcelona branch of this event was organized under the umbrella of the FusionCAT project with reference number 001-P-001722 that has been co-financed by the European Union Regional Development Fund within the framework of the ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020, with the support of Generalitat of Catalonia.
