Relevant initiatives

Science and Technics Foundation

Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica

European

No

Video, Didactical resource

Physics

Italian, English

Teachers, Students

The Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica was founded in 1987 as an initiative of the Tuscan Region and of the Province and Municipality of Florence, with the scientific support of the Museo Galileo. Its aim was to promote and spread scientific and technological culture, starting from the recovery and enhancement of the historic and scientific patrimony of the 19th-century Istituto Tecnico Toscano. The cultural design of the Fondazione is the result of the contribution of ideas and proposals drawn up by the scientists present in its bodies, the cultural institutions with which it collaborates, and the researchers and technicians who operate in the various sectors of its activity.
The aim of the Fondazione is to present and make available a patrimony that has an extremely high value that, up to now, has remained almost unknown and has been conserved in its original location for more than a century. This is a rich collection, unique in Italy, of more than fifty thousand items, divided up between naturalistic collections, scientific instruments, models of machinery, manufactured products, and collections of books of historical interest. In developing the potentials offered by this precious inheritance, the Fondazione intends to promote a permanent activity of spreading scientific culture by setting up an original laboratory in which the appropriate use of historic equipment is flanked by that of current technologies and modern communications techniques.
The website is a showcase the catalogues of the collection that can be consulted online for didactic scopes. The YouTube channel allows seeing the functioning of the instruments of the Foundation’s collection.

This website is a graphically well-done showcase for Foundation’s activities. The latter have a huge didactic potential Unfortunately, it seems they fit better with the real visit to the museum path while to the virtual visitor is given also a detailed description. By one side, this encourages the users to reserve a “real” visit, but, by the other side, it is a limit for a wider diffusion of the initiative.
Nevertheless, good teachers will know how to guide their students to the discovery of the “Physics Office” (http://issuu.com/museofirst/docs/museo_first_guida_gabinetto_fisica) and they will know how to fully exploit the interesting videos available on the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/florencefst?feature=watch.
One last didactically noteworthy feature for Italian students is the availability of the whole website both in Italian and in English.

This website was created by the Science and Technics Foundation of Florence in order to foster the activities of the Foundation itself. Nevertheless it contains two sections that can be didactical useful for Physics: “Catalogo di Strumenti della Fisica” (“Inventory of Physic Tools”) and the “YouTube channel”. The former, available on the bottom of the homepage, gathers many descriptive sheets and several images of the equipment of Foundation’s museum. The latter shows the video with captions in English describing how the equipment works.

Some sections are not useful to the physics study because they seem to be an offer to buy materials produced by the Foundation.
I find interesting the section dedicated to “Catalogo di Strumenti della Fisica” (“Inventory of Physic Tools”) and Events section.