News and events

Japanese Students visit the School of Geosciences and the Monash Science Centre

From 23rd to 29th of March 2007, the School of Geosciences and the Monash Science Centre hosted a delegation from the Notre Dame Jogakuin School in Kyoto, Japan. These high school girls (Mari and Yuri Kamitani, and Yumiko and Satoko Miyazaki, and their mothers Ruri Kamitani and Keiko Miyazaki) and the Head of Science (Mitsuharu Nakagawa) from this high-powered school presented a project that won high honours in Tokyo at the Annual Science Fair last year.

Prof. Vickers Rich with Notre Dame Jogakuin students at the Kyoto University Museum

The project was The Box of Dinosaurs, a science box on geology and palaeontology originally developed in the Monash School of Geosciences for late Primary and High School students in Australia. The box allows students to investigate with "hands-on" rocks, bones and casts of bones, the environments and biota of the late Mesozoic of Australia. It was particularly aimed at providing some thought provoking exercises tied to the Curriculum and Standards Frameworks in Australia, dealing with climate change and its effects on life near the time of a major extinction event when most dinosaurs and much associated fauna and flora were faced with extinction around 65 million years ago.

Prof. Vickers Rich and Prof. Terufumi Ohno (Kyoto University) addressing a science class at the Notre Dame Jogakuin School in Kyoto, Japan.

Prof. Patricia Vickers-Rich was a Japan Scholar for the Promotion of Science recipient, based at Kyoto University from October 2005 to February 2006. The students from the Nortre Dame Jogakuin's Science Club first met with Prof. Patricia Vickers-Rich at a public science symposium, she chaired along with Prof. Terufumi Ohno of the Kyoto University Museum. From that meeting these bright and enthusiastic students took on the project of translating the lesson plans and literature of the science box into Japanese, preparing their own moulds of the contained material and localizing the content. They were then able to make available to schools in Japan, this cutting edge science teaching kit, and were also able to offer sessions to the children of Kyoto as part of the public outreach programs of the Kyoto Unviersity Museum, a "sister-institution" of the Monash Science Centre.

Yumiko Miyazaki and Mari Kamitani with children at the Kyoto University Museum

As a result of their visit, these Kyoto students were able to spend time in the research labs of the School of Geosciences, present a public program at the Monash Science Centre, were able to discuss the programs offered at Monash University with Cristina Varsavsky at a special afternoon tea offered by the Faculty of Science. They also visited with Murrindindi and other presenters at the Healesville Sanctuary who have association with the Monash Science Centre. A new program is now under discussion for development of a second teaching kit to be translated into Japanese and utilized in Japanese schools on Natural Hazards, based on a science box developed by the Monash Science Centre .... and so the association continues with enthusiasm. We hope to follow this with a unit on the late Neoproterozoic, rocks, climate, environments and the Earth's first animals, as a part of a UNESCO project (IGCP493) currently active in the School of Geosciences.