PHYSICS EDUCATION-THE BASIC TOOLBOX FOR FUTURE SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS

Our objective is to create an educational platform for the nourishment and development of the future scientists and inventors. This program is designed to encourage and excite the highly capable and motivated youth with scientific orientation, that currently are not living up to their potential. This is matched with the need to fortify and expand the scientific and innovative community. This is a national initiative for the promotion of the future scientists and inventors. Recognized as a goal of high priority, this project draws leading delegates of Israel's academic community, educational professionals and top rank of entrepreneurs and industrial leaders. The Dov Lautman Youth Educational Unit at Tel Aviv University was the first one to rise to the challenge, and the first pilot program, was launched at Tel Aviv University in July 2009. Similar projects are been planned for summer 2011 at the Technion, the Hebrew University and at the Weizmann Institute. For the last 10 years, the Youth Education Unit at TAU has successfully introduced teenagers to academic education, supported by world leading entrepreneur Gil Shwed. Thus, education professionals, researchers and scientists at TAU joined in to formulate a ground breaking new conceptual approach. The program encompasses 3 phases: high-school, undergraduate studies, and research, both in the academy or industry. Here we focus on the first phase, which is very intense. The first stage is to reach out and recruit the relevant population. We have targeted 8th grade graduates, from all sectors of society, that desperately seek intellectual challenges and are unable to find them in their own environment. We believe teenagers should not be cut off from their natural habitat, which is a requisite for their normal development. Thus we have designed this program to provide a complementary framework. It emphasizes positive social behaviour, creating an active learning community and friendship. Our assumption is that the essential "toolbox" for a future scientist or inventor is encapsulated in university physics. Besides the essential knowledge of physics, it requires basic university mathematics. It demands from the pupil systematic, abstractive, analytic and creative thinking. We enhance their quantitative thinking, in many dimensions and scales, modelling and searching for fundamental relations as well as lab work. On top of the intellectual challenges, through physics education, we encourage our youth to master necessary skills such as: good time management and regime, personal responsibility, accuracy and attention, hard work, facing disappointment and overcoming failure, communicating with colleagues and asking for help. We hypothesize that although some of these attributes might present great challenge to these teenagers, that usually navigate through school bored and with no effort - with the right program, they can make it and ask for more. Our rational is, that exceptional teachers can lead these youngsters to take part and succeed in undergraduate classical physics courses, within two years in the program. Combined with continuous exposure to role models in the industry and in scientific research, and good mentoring, we propose that the program could enable our pupils to actually join research laboratories by year3, and even make a small contribution of their own. The first implementation of our concepts shows the most promising initial results.