Final Report Summary - CISCI (Cinema and Science) CISCI was an educational project promoting science in schools. It was part of the NUCLEUS cluster funded under the European Science Teaching Initiative of the European Commission's (EC) Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The CISCI project was a partnership between universities, research organisations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) having an extensive and complementary expertise in education, outreach, marketing and information and communications technology (ICT). The CISCI consortium consisted of ten institutions and eight different European member states and the United States (US) under the coordination of the Vienna University of Technology. The website of CISCI (see http://www.cisci.net online) with contents in six different European languages was launched on 1 January 2007.The media coverage and impact of the project and the CISCI platform (see http://www.cisci.net online) was enormous mainly because of the uniqueness of the project. Around the time of the launch of the platform, CISCI was featured in radio and TV broadcasts, magazines and newspapers reaching a total number of approximately 11 million people. For instance, the German language version of the CISCI platform already reached an astounding number of 45 000 page views.The CISCI partners also employed an extensive dissemination strategy including a whole variety of different dissemination activities and events to attract the target groups to the website. The project was promoted and disseminated through educational portals and websites, presentations at national and European workshops and conferences, promotion material as well as events related to 'Cinema and Science'.CISCI combined the two most popular media among youngsters, namely movies and the Internet, aiming to stimulate interest in science while dispelling widely-spread misconceptions that arise from pseudo-science. CISCI set up a free database with movie scenes and video clips taken from popular movies and documentaries that served to illustrate scientific concepts and analysed their scientific content from the point of view of different subjects taught at school, like for example physics, chemistry, life sciences and mathematics. On a web-based platform CISCI provided this new innovative classroom resource for school teachers and their pupils. The main purpose of CISCI was to enhance the attractiveness of science teaching in schools across Europe complementing formal curricula. The primary target groups were European school teachers and their pupils. As a secondary target also the general public was addressed.CISCI had a unique position in the educational sector, because it combined the most popular media of the young generation, namely moving pictures and the Internet. This project made science teaching more interesting and attractive by providing teachers with simple-to-use, just-in-time, well-prepared lessons with movie scenes as 'anchor' for teaching science in the classroom. The impact of CISCI with respect to media coverage as well as the number of visitors and users of the CISCI platform had already reached at the launch of the platform an astoundingly high level. Related documents Final Report - CISCI (Cinema and Science)
