De Praktijk is a creative independent company for science education and communication. We develop educational concepts and materials, and offer advice on subjects related to students, schools and education. In our eight years of existence De Praktijk has grown to a company that prides itself on a high quality portfolio of out of the ordinary education and communication projects. These projects are built on the knowledge and experience of the seven people in our office, but profit enormously from our extensive network of students, teachers, school managers, scientists, science communication experts and others. Over 1200 teachers and other interested parties are "registered members", who have free access to our online, open educational materials. We strive to empower teachers to give lessons that are high quality and fun at the same time. Breaking the normal pattern of teaching in the classroom is a powerful tool in reaching students. Lessons that are out of the ordinary stand out and are well remembered.
We choose our projects and clients carefully. We work in commission of third parties or we initiate a project and gather partners ourselves. In 2007 we have been working on, among many other projects:
- De Jonge Akademie on Wheels, in commission of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In two project pilots in March and June, 25 Academy members, 20 PhD students, two farmers and a tv presenter submerged a school in science and fun for a whole day. More events will follow. De Praktijk develops the educational concepts and materials and produces the events.
- DisWis, a project with prof. Alexander Schrijver, mathematician and Spinoza Prize winner. University students in mathematics visit secondary schools to teach the latest developments in discrete mathematics, to great acclaim. De Praktijk initiated the project and leads it, developing all materials and recruiting and training the university students. Through DisWis, De Praktijk is involved in the development of the new national mathematics curriculum.
- Open Content, content published under less strict copyright licenses. We have recently switched to publishing all our materials under Creative Commons licenses (creativecommons.org). This means we grant some or all of the rights on the materials to the public. Together with Creative Commons Nederland we are developing models to make education more open.