Contextualized and socially relevant hands-on activities are an effective way to promote students’ involvement in the construction of knowledge. Considering the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the preservation of water resources is crucial for the sustainable development of a country. Therefore, the PVC project was implemented in the context of water quality monitoring. There were 440 students and 9 chemistry teachers involved. A low-cost portable pedagogical kit was developed in order to determine the temperature, turbidity, pH, concentration of nitrates and nitrites, percentage of dissolved oxygen, salinity, and presence of microplastics in coastal water samples. The results indicate that the hands-on activities have contributed to the learning of chemical contents related to water quality parameters. Finally, the commitment, motivation, and autonomy of the participating students should be highlighted.

The active participation of citizens in scientific research, through citizen science, has been proven successful. However, knowledge on the potential of citizen science within formal chemistry learning, at the conceptual...

Due to the generalization of electronically supported activities, we anticipate that, in the near future, the letter "e" in "e-learning," indicating the use of electronic media and information and communication technologies in education, will be dropped and that "e-learning" will be referred to as simply "learning." This paper presents an attempt at understanding the causes of the name shift and at predicting its consequences. We offer a constructive reflection on how e-learning has been looked upon and on what we foresee will happen in the future, drawing briefly on several areas of knowledge and on the experience of the authors as educators at university, teacher training and high school levels. Our effort has also resulted in greater awareness of the importance of social tools and of the relevance of the human factor in the learning process. IntroductionThe Information Age has reached maturity. During these last decades, we have witnessed the generalization of electronically supported activities to areas such as communication or commerce and, naturally, also to education. The use of electronic media and information and communication technologies (ICT) in different areas was indicated by the letter "e" and expressions such as "e-mail," "e-commerce" and "e-learning" were originated.

Modern societies moved towards academic and professional specialization, and human activity has been rigidly structured and split. The enduring gap between science and art, which academic curricula mirror and sustain, reproduces rather than changes the patterns of social inclusion and exclusion. In this commentary, we review some empirical endeavors to merge poetry with chemistry from an ecological, developmental, and constructivist perspective. It seems important to involve students in structured activities promoting a socio-historical understanding of the opportunities and constraints acting on chemistry, the significance of chemistry theories and methods, and a holistic approach to chemistry as a field of self-expression and social commitment. By merging poetry with chemistry, we expect not only that students learn chemistry, but also that they develop scientific literacy skills as well as a more critical view on the co-extensiveness of modern challenges.

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