The 17th Croatian Symposium on Physics Education was held in Osijek from 26 to 28 February 2025. For the past 34 years, the symposium has been bringing together physics professionals on a biennial basis. The event was organized by the Croatian Physical Society in cooperation with the Department of Physics, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, the Association of Physicists Osijek, the Physical Society Split, and the Agency for Education and Training.
This year’s symposium gathered around 200 participants—primary and secondary school teachers, researchers, and university professors—with the aim of strengthening collaboration and connections across all levels of the education system. The program focused on topics related to the improvement and modernization of physics education, including examples of good teaching practice, assessment and achievement of learning outcomes, innovative approaches and modern technologies in teaching, inquiry-based learning, interdisciplinary aspects of physics, and the professional development of teachers.
Invited speakers included Prof. Rajka Jurdana Šepić (Faculty of Physics, University of Rijeka), Assoc. Prof. Maja Planinić (Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb), and Assoc. Prof. Ana Sušac (Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb), who presented recent developments in physics education research and methodology.
During the three days of the symposium, 43 presentations, 21 workshops, and 19 posters were delivered. More information is available on the symposium’s website.
We are pleased to announce the successful completion of the digitization of the journal Fizika (1968–1991). For the first time, this valuable part of the history of Croatian physics is now fully accessible online.
The project was initiated and carried out by Prof. Gordana Stubičan Ladešić, Head Librarian of the Library of the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb. The goal was to bring the journal Fizika out of the library archives and make it available to the wider scientific and educational community. Over the past two years, she carried out the digitization process and the entry of scientific articles, successfully completing this extensive and demanding project.
In total, 92 volumes and 32 supplements were digitized, comprising 14,260 pages. From 23 volumes, 826 PDFs of scientific articles and letters to the editor were extracted, while 1,525 PDFs of conference abstracts were extracted from the supplements. All scanned pages were processed using OCR technology, enabling full-text search across the entire collection.
In 2025, Dijana Sever joined the project and took on a significant part of the work related to entering the supplements, which contain a large number of abstracts from scientific conferences.
The journal has now been included in Hrčak – the Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals, providing open access to its content, improving its visibility, and facilitating citation. Detailed metadata have been entered for each article, including authors and affiliations, titles and abstracts in Croatian and English, and page ranges. Each record also includes a permanent URL, ensuring long-term preservation and accessibility.
The journals Fizika A (Physics A) i and Fizika B (Physics B) have also been included in the Hrčak portal. As these journals were already available in PDF format, digitization was not required; however, the same process of inclusion in Hrčak and the entry of articles and associated metadata was carried out.
The journal Fizika is available at https://hrcak.srce.hr/fizika.
In summer 2025, the European Physical Society (EPS) published the third edition of the report The Importance of Physics to the Economies of Europe. The report highlights the significant economic impact of physics-based industries across the EU, EEA, and the UK over the past six years, demonstrating the strong contribution of physics to economic growth and innovation in Europe.
The full report is available on the EPS website.
