The Galileo Museum in Florence is one of the most important and most visited museums of the history of science in Italy. On July 2nd, the museum's Head of Educational Activities, Andrea Gori, who is the scientific referent for the Galileo Museum within the Va3SCoDi project, welcomed the research team from Pisa, in particular the research fellow Luca Rocca and Professor Valentina Domenici.
This is not the first time that the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry has collaborated with the Galileo Museum: in previous years, in 2019 and 2023, Professor Domenici brought undergraduate students of the course Fundamentals and Teaching Methodologies for Chemistry Education to visit the Galileo Museum. After the visit, the students designed educational pathways inspired by the Medici collections.
This experience also led to a publication in the journal of history of science named Substantia, describing how, starting from a part of the Medici collection containing historical glassware items such as thermometers and thermoscopes, it was possible to design hands-on educational activities using an integrated STEAM and historical approach for high school students.
During the visit to the museum, Andrea Gori, an expert in museum education, presented the museum’s latest initiatives for inclusion. In particular, he showed a new tactile pathway that guides visually impaired visitors through the museum’s galleries, as well as new multimedia videos that feature explanations in both Italian and English, enriched with 3D graphic animations, and now also include the explanation with the Italian Sign Language (LIS). As Gori explained, the inclusion is one of the fundamental aspects of the Galileo Museum’s outreach and dissemination efforts, and it is also a key feature of the museum’s educational philosophy.
The visit concluded with a discussion of the initial steps of planning several workshops on ‘optics’, which will feature objects from the Pisa collection and educational artifacts prepared at the Galileo Museum.
Domenici, V. (2022). Training of Future Chemistry Teachers by a Historical / STEAM Approach Starting from the Visit to an Historical Science Museum. Substantia, 7(1), 23–34. https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-1755
