About RM @ Schools
Raw MatTERS Ambassadors at Schools 3.0 is a Wider Society Learning project focused on making science education and careers in raw materials attractive for youngsters aged 10-19 years. The toolkits of RM @ Schools focus on six Knowledge & Innovation Themes (KIT):
1. Exploration
2. Mining
3. Metallurgical processes
4. Recycling
5. Substitution of critical materials
6. Circular economy.
In this page you can find learning pathways and toolkits to perform hands-on experiments in class.
RM @ Schools Resources
CRMs Memory Card Game
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Simple card game that can be used to learn, the main properties and uses of several critical raw materials, as well as their importance nowadays in our technological society. Students will also be introduced to the current worldwide environmental and socioeconomically concerns Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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The main aim of the game is to point out the importance of raw materials in our daily lives. Within the game students are reading educational texts accompanying particular tasks. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
FIND the elements – Treasure Hunt 2.0
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A revisiting of the classic game of treasure hunt, that make players aware of the issues in Critical Raw Materials, Electronic Waste Revalorization, Urban Mining and Circular Economy. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
Glass Raw Materials
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In this toolkit there are presented different raw materials used to produce glass. It is very comprehensive, and the activities can be carried out by participants from 5 to 18 years old. Ages: 5 and up Language: EN | PT |
Who wants to be a RM Ambassador?
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This game includes questions of increasing difficulty concerning the origins of minerals, the ways of identifying minerals, the everyday products made by raw materials, divided into 3 stages Ages: 10-19 Language: EN . |
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Alginit: the multifuctional raw material 
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The alginic testing box is an educational toolkit that helps students to experience the complexity of nature whilst examining one specific rock: alginic. four experiments are proposed. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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The two main questions to be asked and answered during this lesson are the following: 1. Why do we need mineral raw materials? 2. How does mining work nowadays? Ages: 10-13 Language: EN |
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Clever Clay – test the properties of loam 
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This teaching material is based on the work of college students from the Babits Mihály Gimnázium, Pécs, Hungary. The aim of the work was to examine the durability properties of an eco-friendly construction material, the loam adding different additives to the raw clay-rich material. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | HU |
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Through group work, students become scientists who must figure out what other raw materials they need to finished production of a smartphones. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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Journey to the Centre of the Earth 
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Students compete against each other in a board game. The themes are basic geological concepts, characteristics of rocks, their different uses and identification of rocks with an app called RockCheck. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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This toolkit provides an interactive learning approach to the world of raw materials, minerals in specific. Teaching materials is introductory to this topic. From a pedagogical perspective this game can be connected with a visit in a mineralogical museum to provide a more haptic and visual experience with minerals. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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With mineral recognition key MineralCheck, students will be able to determine the name of most common minerals. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | SLO |
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RawMatCards : a game with Raw Materials 
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A simple card game, which can be used in a group of students, to show them the main uses of several critical raw materials. Groups of 3 to 5 students can be made, and they have to guess the uses of each one of the raw materials present in the cards. The group that completes all the uses of more raw materials win. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | Bosnian | Serbian | Croatian |
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RAWsiko - Materials Around Us (Board Game) 
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This game wants to raise awareness about a problem that is still underestimated: in a near future the supply of several metals or minerals, which belong to the non-renewable resources of our planet together with non-metallic minerals, coal, oil, and natural gas, will be at risk. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | IT |
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RAWsiko – Material around us (Digital Version) 
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RAWsiko – Digital Version is set in a fantasy future world where the main producer of critical RMs decides to cut the export to the rest of the planet, and therefore a “RM rush” begins. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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RM@Art - Coloring with minerals 
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This toolkit is designed to demonstrate some of the basic concepts of usage of ores and minerals in making colors and ultimately using those colors to make a painting. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | IT | DE |
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Students can determine names of basic rocks, by observation and experiments only and help of application RockCheck. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | SLO |
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A serious game that connects two already formed toolkits (MinerlCheck and RockCheck) and summarises the knowledge gained through the gamification. Students can determine names of basic rocks, by observation and experiments with a game. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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Social acceptance of mining activities 
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The aim of the lesson is to introduce students to the problem of obtaining social acceptance in mining activities. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ES |
The Volcanic “Popcorn” - Perlite: The Enviromentally Friendly Raw Material
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Perlite is a multiply applicable environmentally friendly raw material. Since environmental protection is highly important the application of perlite is much more preferred than artificial material with similar characteristics. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | HU |
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A mine of ideas - Municipal waste management - what is worth to know? 
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The most important assumptions of municipal waste management will be presented, besides solutions to the problem of the growing amount of waste. The participants will get acquainted with the basic concepts from the above-mentioned topics and will learn about the methods that they can use in their everyday life and household. The main aim of the lesson is to introduce students to the problem of municipal waste management. Ages: 10-13 Language: EN |
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Copper: never ending recycling - How to recover copper from electrical circuits |
This toolkit is designed to help you and your students begin thinking about scientific and technological Raw Materials issues —why it is important and how resources can be conserved and protected. It is intended to help you and your students understand what raw materials are, where they come from, why it’s a problem and what can be done about it. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ES | FR |
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Electrochemistry lab experiences with critical raw materials 
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The concept of raw material refers to any good that aims to transform during a production process until it becomes an element of consumption. Many of the material goods require a modification or transformation before it can be used by users. For instance, the LEDs used in one of the experiences of this toolkit. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | IT | FR |
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The principle of material separation by flotation is experimentally illustrated using the example of paper deinking. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | IT | FR |
Let's make recycling blue
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Nowadays Prussian Blue can be used to capture critical raw materials in order to recycle them. As a matter of fact, these materials are really rare and expensive. Its particular structure can interact with CRMs isotopes and capture them. Actually, it is also used in the pharmaceutical sector to soak up dangerous substances in infected hosts. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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This toolkit introduces the students to the subject of metallic packaging recycling, the so called "tin can" that started with the boxes in tinplate that were made by rolling and soldering to a small cylinder a band of metallic sheet, covered by a thin layer of tin on the side in contact with food to protect the metal from corrosion. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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The aim of this toolkit is to provide a first hands-on experience for young students (10-19 years) with raw materials by creating their own useful everyday object. They will learn the difference between virgin and secondary raw materials and about natural raw materials, which are applied in the field of construction (building materials) and the importance of recycling materials. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | DE |
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Recycling of silicon based PV modules 
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In this experiment, the pupils will firstly assemble and then disassemble a photovoltaic (PV) mini- panel in order to understand the basic principles behind the important recycling process of PV wastes Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | IT | ESP |
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In the ResourceRation game, each of you is individually responsible for a small business. You are required to buy resources for this business. To this end, you will receive starting capital and, at intervals, earnings generated by your business activities. The game ends when one person has played all their personal playing tokens, there is a long period in which many players have run out of money, or when all the resources have been used up. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN |
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Identify rare earths within a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | DE |
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Saving copper from waste. Ages: 10-13 Language: EN | ESP |
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Separation of copper and iron: two different approaches 
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This module illustrates two different methods to separate metals, one from another. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ESP |
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Assembly of several , microbial fuel cells for electricity production testing several carbohydrate rich nutrients. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ESP |
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Solid phase ion-exchange in recycling processes (cation exchanger) 
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Diluted aqueous solutions of metal salts are obtained during recycling processes. The use of ion exchange resins has been proofed to be the process of choice in this field. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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Students can build their own the wheel and the linked cards, following the instructions in the toolkit. Then they can play in small groups. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | IT |
The Recycling Goose Game
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Through the game, students gather a deeper understanding of what can and can’t be recycled and how to correctly sort different waste for a separate waste collection. Ages: 10-13 Language: EN |
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Ammonia Recovery from Wastewater 
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Our wastewater has become a source of nutrients and energy towards closing the loop for a circular economy. Amongst all the nutrients present in wastewater, nitrogen plays a vital role in plant growth. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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In this experiment, waste paper will be used as raw material for the production of ethanol. Paper will be pre-treated (chopped and mixed with water), digested with a safe commercial enzyme and fermented with regular grocery store yeast. Ethanol generated by these two reactions will be then monitored through the use of either an ethanol sensor or a dye that, reacting selectively with alcohol, will change colour revealing its presence. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
EcoCEO - entrepreneurship for a circular economy!
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ecoCEO™ brings circular economy strategies and business models to the classroom and makes students familiar with raw material challenges, circular product design and sustainable entrepreneurship! Play, learn, and have plenty of fun! Ages: 14-19 Language: Estonian | EN | DE | IT | NL |
Modern devices -Yes, please! What about mining?
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Toolkit raises awareness about the importance of raw materials and the impact of the circular economy on our life. Exercises and challenges in PDF presentation develop a better understanding of raw materials use, opportunities for mining in Europe and show students the impact of circular economy strategies on the performance of a company. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | SLO |
Phosphorus Recovery from Wastewater
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The laboratory activity is planned in one part as theoretical training under the guidance of the teacher and in another as practice where students become the main protagonists of all phases of the work (from design to evaluation). The aim of the laboratory activity is to produce the synthetic urine, from which the struvite (rich of phosphorous) is extracted, and to build a simple prototype reactor for the extraction of struvite from synthetic wastewater Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
Preventing eutrophication by phosphate adsorption from wastewater
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In this toolkit students are working on a method to remove and recover phosphate from (waste)water. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
Renewable keratin wastes for use in metal mining
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Biopolymers from sustainable resources are being considered as alternatives to commodity synthetic polymers. Keratin from wool wastes can be used to prepare biodegradable new products for biomedical fields and filtration systems for water depuration and air cleaning. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | DE | IT |
Struvite from urine
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This toolkit teaches students that waste can be a source of valuable and useful raw Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
Sus-GAME-ability
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The Sus-GAME-ability toolkit provides an introductory lesson on sustainability and the environment. It serves as an initial introductory lesson to introduce students to the topic of sustainability and what impact sustainability has on our environment. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | DE |
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Blue Energy is a sustainable technology for electricity generation. The electricity is generated by using the salinity gradient between river water and seawater (fresh and salt). With Blue Energy a new technique is developed which could help using less dangerous and environmentally toxic batteries, like the Lithium ones. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |
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In this toolkit there are three envelops with three different activities to explore the Lab-on-Paper technology. These activities aim to help the students explore the properties and wide variety of applications of paper and learn about hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials. Ages: 10-19 Language: EN | ES | PT |
Printed Meteorological Station - printed sensors on paper
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In this activity, students will get to know the basic transduction principal behind resistive temperature, relative humidity, and UV sensors. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | PT |
Power electronics
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Silicon is probably the most famous semiconductor. It is mainly used for computing and its technology has been perfected for decades. However, other semiconductors are going to enter our lives since in some cases they can outperform silicon for some applications. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ES |
Raw materials and sustainability: what can composite materials contribute?
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Here you find information on the topic of fiber composites and answers to the question to what extent this material can contribute to sustainable industrial production. "Kitchen - fiber composite" can be produced and tested according to instructions. This course includes a project task that can be worked on by teams of students - taking into account the basic principles of project management, which are explained in explanatory videos and materials for teachers and students. Student teams can receive a certificate if they complete the project task! Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | DE |
Raw Material Substitution in electronic, optoelectronic and photovoltaic technologies
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Substitution of critical RMs in PV such as Gallium and Indium in solar cells, by using Organic Materials. Use of graphene to substitute ITO used as transparent conductive electrode in flat displays and in solar cells. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ES |
Solar cells... from cranberry juice!!!
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Students can learn about alternative semiconducting materials to convert light into electricity and handle no dangerous and/or toxic compounds/components to easily fabricate a working solar cell. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | ES |
The rebels need you! Develop sustainable adhesives and save the world
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This lesson is based on a science fiction story to motivate students to explore the world of gluing Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | DE |
What are fiber reinforced plastics and what are they used for?
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This "toolkit" introduces school pupils to the fascinating world of fiber reinforced plastics. Special attention is put on the advantageous properties of these materials and also the hurdles that still have to be overcome to fully recycle fiber reinforced plastics. In addition, school pupils will get an insight into biobased matrix materials which open up a host of research opportunities and have the potential to party solve the recycling problem. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN | DE |
Woodchips - wonderful material!
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Nowadays the most frequently used insulating materials are the glass wool, polystyrene and polyurethane foam. Although all these materials have very good thermal insulating properties, their manufacturing requires a lot of energy. We would like to replace these environmentally damaging insulating materials and produce a more environmentally friendly insulation. Ages: 14-19 Language: EN |