Author: David Lee

UPDATE - 13 April 2021

In the March Issue of e-EPS, it was announced that the EPS General Meeting would take place in Belgrade Serbia on Tuesday 31 August 2021, as part of the Balkan Physical Union General Meeting. Unfortunately, the organisers of the BPU and the EPS have decided that due to the current sanitary crisis due to the COVID 19 epidemic, the BPU General Meeting and the EPS General Meeting will be postponed. The EPS will organise its General Meeting as a virtual meeting later in 2021. The date and time will be announced in e-EPS.

22 March 2021 - The European Physical Society and the Balkan Physical Union are working together to organise the 11th Balkan Physical Union General Conference, that is scheduled to take place in Belgrade, Serbia from August 29 until 2 September 2021. The EPS will organise its General Meeting during the conference on Tuesday 31 August 2021.

The agenda of the formal session beginning at 10:30 is:

1) Report on EPS activities, 2018-2021;
2) Report on EPS finances 2018-2021;
3) Report on the development of the EPS 2018 - 2021;
4) General Discussion.

The formal session is open to all EPS members.

More information on BPU11 can be found here: https://bpu11.info

Author: NNV

In the afternoon of April 16^th, the NNV organises its annual conference FYSICA 2021. For the second time in row, it is an online conference due to the pandemic. Nobel Prize laureates Reinhard Genzel and Roger Penrose will give key-note lectures. Because of our centennial, it’s our treat and everyone can register free of charge. This means that there is no threshold to attend the meeting: language is English, it is an online event so no travelling and it is free of charge. Interested? Take a look at the website www.fysica.nl. We would love to welcome you.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and the ensuing lockdowns in early 2020 forced universities to move rapidly to distance teaching in order to minimize the spread of the disease. With very little time to prepare and in many cases little or no experience of on-line teaching, there was a strong sense of an emergency response to a crisis, with students showing  a great deal of understanding. However, with the summer of 2020 providing at least some opportunity to plan for the onset of the new academic year in the autumn of 2020, there has been an expectation that on-line teaching should provide an educational experience that matches students’ expectations. The Physics Education Division, working with the Higher Education Group of the Institute of Physics in London and GIREP, the International Group on Physics Education Research, is undertaking a project to evaluate the move to on-line teaching and we would appreciate your help, as readers of EPN, to gather information.

The survey is entirely anonymous and provides for short descriptive or reflective comments on up to three different activities. There are also a few questions aimed at some contextual information about the respondent, such as country, as well as a link to an independent survey which is intended only to provide the opportunity to supply contact details should you be happy to be contacted further. These details are not linked in any way to the teaching survey and there is no intention to link responses to specific individuals. In this way we hope to get an insight into views of on-line teaching across Europe.

We would also like to elicit the views of students across Europe and have prepared a similar survey. We would appreciate your help in distributing the link to your students regardless of whether you complete the staff survey or not. Again, the information is anonymous and is intentionally not linked to the staff survey. Nor does it ask for any information about individual members of academic staff or even the institution. Our aim is to evaluate whether students share the same perceptions as staff about what is effective or not in remote teaching.

The survey is open until July, but an early response would be appreciated, and we aim to report back through EPN with some conclusions about what is effective and why and where opportunities lie for further work in developing on-line teaching.

The staff survey can be accessed at:   https://tinyurl.com/yt6cig44

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If you are willing to disseminate the survey to your students, we have prepared the following text to help you.

What are your views of on-line teaching?

As a student of Physics, it would be valuable to hear your thoughts on the transition to online teaching and assessment in Physics in response to the Covid pandemic. What has worked well? What has been more challenging?  What changes would you like to see retained even when we are allowed to teach face-to-face again?

This survey is quick to answer and is gathering the views of physics students across Europe.  It is anonymous, and your thoughts are really valuable to inform future teaching of Physics.

The student survey can be accessed at:    https://tinyurl.com/1gx6xtvo

This survey is being run through the professional organisations: GIREP, the International Group on Physics Education Research; EPS, the European Physical Society, and IOP, the UK Institute of Physics.

Author: Jan Mlynar

On the EPS supported project proposed and managed by the Czech Physical Society

Science to Go is a Czech organization whose mission is to bring science to a lay audience. Our target audience is adult people, and target places vary from municipal libraries to pubs in small towns or villages. Wherever we go, we bring our enthusiasm for science with us that we want to share with people. Most presenters in Science to Go are young researchers and PhD students - people who are doing top science, who work on narrow topics but are happy to present them engagingly and put them in a broader perspective. A typical Science to Go event is held in the evening, it is ninety minutes long, and it is a mix of three very different natural sciences topics. We always go to places where there are lay people not necessarily interested in the sciences. We don't do presentations in Academia.

Since 2014, there have been about 60 Science to Go events. In total, about 60 topics have been presented by 60 young scientists. Science to Go visited about 15 different places all over the Czech Republic. However, it is firmly established just in the Czech capital city of Prague, where we present scientific topics regularly in the Scout Institute at the Old Town Square. After the covid-19 crisis, we plan to significantly extend our list of places where we regularly go.

The covid-19 crisis didn't stop us! Although it is impossible to organize in-person events, we keep working on scientific outreach by available means. We started a successful facebook show, presenting one topic in 15 minutes each time. We began to do short animated videos and ended up with a film, "A Day with Particles", that had a premiere at the most renowned particle physics conference, ICHEP2020. The film was awarded an honorable mention at the Prague International Monthly Film Festival. During the short period when restrictions were released, we organized a couple of regular shows, we presented Science to Go to the community of physicists at the Conference of Czech and Slovak Physicists, and we projected the film "A Day with Particles" at a conference of Czech physics teachers.

We are very much looking forward to restarting our in-person events. However, we plan to stay in the online world at the same time and to continue with the Facebook show. Also, we have started to record our live events and to put the videos on YouTube. The online activities were created with the massive help of financial support provided by the EPS. We bought a camera, underwent recording training, and profited from a private company's services and expertise specialized in video recording. The film "A Day with Particles" was co-financed by the EPS support. The future of Science to Go is ahead of us, and we cannot wait for the beautiful mix of live and online activities!

• Dr. Laurence Ramos, directeur de recherche at CNRS in Montpellier (France), will be the next chair of the Soft Matter and Biophysics section of the Condensed Matter division. Her webpage is: https://coulomb.umontpellier.fr/user/laurence.ramos?lang=en
• The new dates for the next general Condensed Matter conference (CMD29) in Manchester are 21-26 August 2022. The conference webpage is: http://cmd29.iopconfs.org/Home