This week saw the start (on Mon, Jul 13, 2015) of the 8th MSC Euromaster summer school 2015 in Puławy (Poland).

As in previous years, a core aim of the Summer school is shifting the activities away from the classical lecture-type of teaching by increasing the share of discussions, hands-on work, teamwork. As usual, a key activity of the summer school is the contest of student teams (setting up virtual laboratories and interacting with customers), which tests their knowledge and skills in all areas of metrology in chemistry.

This year the summer school makes further advances in terms of this “core shift”. One of the modules, which was carried out differently, was measurement uncertainty, which was the the main responsibility of UT during the summer school. Instead of the classical way – starting with lecture and then moving to discussion – the students were well in advance of the Summer school asked to learn the basic (and quite some not so basic) topics of measurement uncertainty using the web course Estimation of Measurement Uncertainty in Chemical Analysis. This way the lecturing part was omitted completely from the Summer school, as students had the necessary preparation. Thus, the whole measurement uncertainty module at the Summer school consisted of a big session of discussions and problem solving.

Another module, where hands-on work was very important was the Internal and external quality control module (delivered mainly by Ricardo Da Silva from University of Lisbon). He organised an “interlaboratory comparison” between students (in visual photometry) as a part of the session! Students were very excited to see how their results compared to their colleagues’ results.

The summer school still has one week to go and will finish on Fri, Jul 24, 2015.