Football in Science Teaching

Back in 2000, hundreds of teachers from all over Europe responded to a call of the European Union and EIROforum to improve scientific literacy in the EU. We gathered at CERN for the “Physics on Stage” event, the predecessor of the Science on Stage festivals that are now celebrated every other year in different European countries. At that time, long before the famous survey conducted by John Hattie, it was already becoming clear to us that one of the most crucial factors in successful teaching is the teacher. 

In order to give European teachers more opportunities to share their great ideas, Science on Stage has developed follow-up activities in addition to the festivals. One of these activities is iStage, which is kindly and generously supported by SAP. In iStage 3 we cover a topic that matters a great deal to our students: football! 

20 of the best teachers from 15 European countries worked together for one and a half years to share their expertise. They created teaching units for the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, computing, and mathematics about our biosphere, the human body, the ball, and big data. Here we can see that football really lends itself to the teaching of natural science. 

The process of creating these iStage brochures is special, as we focus strongly on the professional skills of the teachers. During personal meetings, these experts from different countries develop the ideas for the brochures, bearing in mind the situation in their own schools. The teaching units are also tested in real lessons by the participants, and as a result we are confident that we are presenting examples that actually work in real life. In order to create this brochure, the participants of iStage 3 worked hard in their free time besides their normal jobs. Thank you for this endeavour—the results are great! 

Our iStage trilogy is now complete. Of course we will continue our work, since Science on Stage knows very well that the teacher and the topic are the things that matter.