Mission education

The overall ‘Mission Education’ of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings aims to promote a wide recognition for science and research and to foster support for a knowledge-based society. It applies especially to the area of science education. In this spirit, educative content of the Lindau Mediatheque is being gradually developed for use in schools. Moreover, teachers are supported in their work and involved in the dialogue with scientists.

Children and young people usually become enthusiastic about science at school. This is where they acquire the basic knowledge and skills for a research career. Teachers play a significant role in the fundamental training of future scientists. As part of the overall mission to support and promote initiatives towards better education, Teaching Spirit is a programme that rewards teachers who have shown extraordinary dedication in teaching science in school.

Select teachers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland are invited to attend a Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting to gain inspiration and new ideas for creative and motivational teaching.

The Teaching Guides are pedagogic, bilingual units (German/English) enhanced with appropriate worksheets, films and methodologies. The lessons support students in acquiring a deeper understanding of competencies in the fields of natural and social sciences as well as economy. They are designed in collaboration with Lehrer-Online, a provider of teaching materials.

Every year, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Karolinska Institutet publish a poster series explaining the discoveries of the Nobel Prize. As their partner, the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings makes the posters available in German for download or to be ordered by schools/teachers.

More than a dozen Nobel Laureates have made their workplaces virtually accessible in the mediatheque: The 360° panoramic photos taken by photographer Volker Steger depict their labs in great detail; embedded video and audio recordings add to the entertaining and educational experience of a virtual lab tour. Nobel Labs 360° can be displayed in web applications, on personal tablet computers, or on large touch screens in exhibitions.

The mediatheque contains biographical profiles of all Nobel Laureates who have thus far participated in the Lindau Meetings. They are gradually being supplemented with explanatory information – the Research Profiles – on the scientific accomplishments of the laureates, relating their research to historical as well as to contemporary scientific context.

Following a contemporary didactic approach, the mediatheque is complemented with short animated videos – Mini Lectures – outlining key issues of science and research in both an educative as well as an entertaining fashion.

With unique content dating back to 1952, the mediatheque of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings maps their rich history of scientific dialogue. This archive of decades is gradually being developed further to provide a learning platform and research resource for scientists and those fascinated by science, particularly teachers and students. Moreover, select mediatheque content is successively made accessible via educative content providers.

Nearly half of the approximately 1,500 lectures held by Nobel Laureates at the Lindau Meetings thus far have been documented in the mediatheque: It contains over 700 videos or picture slide shows, many of which are subtitled and annotated, as well as abstracts and full transcripts.

By clustering and contextualising related mediatheque content in Topic Clusters, a team of editors continuously compiles comprehensible introductions to major scientific fields and topics. Recent examples are viruses, gravitational waves, or subatomic particles.

With Life Paths, mediatheque users can vividly display and compare the life and career paths of Nobel Laureates on a rotatable globe. The data from their biographies was compiled and processed in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The more life paths tracked, the more convenient it becomes to identify parallels and differences in researchers’ careers. Life Paths is based on an idea by Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias.