This year’s Popular Science Forum is to be held online on Saturday next week by the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium (NMMBA) in Pingtung County.
Each year, five science museums — the National Taiwan Science Education Center, the National Museum of Natural Science, the National Science and Technology Museum, the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology and the NMMBA — take turns hosting the annual forum, the Ministry of Education’s Department of Lifelong Education said yesterday.
The forum is the largest exchange event promoting popular science education in the nation, it added.
Photo: Lee Li-fa, Taipei Times
Despite the impact of COVID-19, the NMMBA is organizing the event in the spirit of continued learning during the pandemic, the department said.
Through interdisciplinary discussions, attendees are to reflect on the organization of popular science events in the nation over the past decade and explore possibilities for innovation in the area, it added.
As this year is the beginning of the UN’s Decade of Ocean Science, as well as a milestone in the domestic promotion of environmental and sustainability education, the forum is to include topics on environmental education, it said.
More than 250 people have registered for the event, in which about 100 papers are also to be published, it said.
The submissions have come from schools, government agencies and private educational institutions, it said.
The annual event is meant to serve as a platform connecting groups involved in the promotion of popular science and to facilitate cooperation and exchange among them, it said.
Featured speakers at the forum include Shao Kwang-tsao (邵廣昭), a retired researcher from Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center, and Chiu Mei-hung (邱美虹), a professor at National Taiwan Normal University’s Graduate Institute of Science Education, the forum’s program says.
The forum is also to feature a roundtable discussion with the directors of the five museums, it says.
The department said it expects popular science activities arising from interdisciplinary cooperation to become a new trend in the development of popular science.
It said that it is looking forward to making popular science a part of people’s daily lives to meet the demand for lifelong learning and to increase scientific literacy among the public.
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