Ger­many: Kiel Re­search Work­shop

How can al­gae con­trib­ute to al­tern­at­ive en­ergy use? How salty is the Baltic Sea? And what do nan­o­particles do? These are just a few of the ques­tions that will be answered in the them­at­ic­ally fur­nished rooms, the denk:labor, ozean:labor, klick!:labor or the en­er­gie:labor.

In the stu­dent labor­at­ory at the Uni­versity of Kiel, stu­dents and pro­spect­ive teach­ers have the op­por­tun­ity not only to learn about re­search res­ults, but also the pro­cess of sci­entific work in a way that can prof­it­ably com­ple­ment teach­ing at schools.

In­terest in cur­rent sci­ence is aroused. In ad­di­tion, teacher train­ing is offered.

The Kieler Forschung­swerkstatt is a co­oper­a­tion between school and uni­versity, between teacher train­ing and busi­ness, as well as between city and coun­try.

"On the trail of plastic waste" is a joint in­ter­na­tional Cit­izen Sci­ence pro­ject of the Kiel Re­search Work­shop of the Uni­versity of Kiel and Científi­cos de la Bas­ura of the Uni­ver­sidad Católica del Norte in Coquimbo, Chile. The pro­ject fo­cuses on the sci­entific study of mar­ine waste by stu­dents and their twelfth year teach­ers in Ger­many and Chile, be­cause mar­ine waste is a wor­ry­ing and grow­ing prob­lem world­wide.

"Plastic pir­ates - the sea be­gins here" is the second cit­izen sci­ence pro­ject of the Kieler Forschung­swerkstatt to­gether with Científi­cos de la Bas­ura, Chile. School classes in Ger­many are car­ry­ing out a sci­entific ex­ped­i­tion to check for the pres­ence of plastic waste in Ger­man wa­ters, which is largely un­ex­plored.

Since its open­ing in Oc­to­ber 2012, the Kiel Re­search Work­shop has made steady pro­gress: the pro­gramme has been sig­ni­fic­antly ex­pan­ded through in­creased per­son­nel ca­pa­cit­ies and ad­di­tional spon­sors have been won. The range of courses for school classes has ex­pan­ded con­sid­er­ably, par­tic­u­larly in the fields of tech­no­logy, geosciences and soil sci­ence.

Dur­ing the first year of the pro­ject, 630 pu­pils from Ger­many and 760 from Chile car­ried out a na­tion­wide waste col­lec­tion in each coun­try - on 23 beaches in Ger­many and 37 in Chile. After sampling, the stu­dents ana­lysed their own data and sent it to the ex­perts at the Kiel Re­search Work­shop and Científi­cos de la Bas­ura. Thanks to this deep in­volve­ment in sci­entific re­search and the ex­change of res­ults and ex­per­i­ences between the par­ti­cipants from Ger­many and Chile via the pro­ject's in­ter­act­ive web­site (www.save-ocean.org), the young people were then able to an­swer rel­ev­ant ques­tions about the mar­ine con­ser­va­tion prob­lem them­selves: How dirty (or how clean) are Ger­man and Chilean beaches? What types of garbage can be found on Ger­man and Chilean beaches? And above all: where does this garbage come from? Only if we know the sources of mar­ine waste can ad­equate solu­tions be pro­posed and the prob­lem tackled.