Since the release of the founding issue in July, 2000,  this online periodical is growing up steadily in many dimensions. We have already published two issues with 13 articles and 5 special sections in the first volume. Up to now, the first two issues have attracted over 75,000 visits during the last twelve months.  With the help of our Guest Editor, Mr. X.J. Wang, there are quite many readers coming from mainland China as reflected in the registration records. Globalisation can be seen as  another trend of this periodical since there is an increasing number of contributed articles coming from different countries and regions around the Asia-Pacific rim.

In the First Issue of Volume Two, we are very glad to have the Foreword written by the most prestigious science educator, Prof. Peter Fensham who has also contributed in this issue his speech for the Science Education Symposium: Meeting the Challenges of Science Curriculum Reform as organised by the Science Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) on 12 July, 2001.  His paper is grouped with another invited symposium speaker, Prof. Chao-Ti Hsiung's speech (co-authored with Jia-Cheng Chen) and an invited paper by Yeung-chung Lee to form a special section on Science Curriculum which is centered around various approaches for developing primary science curriculum.  Apart from those invited articles, there are three refereed academic articles on "Curriculum change in science teaching" (by Amanda Berry and John Loughran), "A starting point of learning to teach science topics at the primary level" (by May Cheng) and "Perceptions of teaching and learning in year one university Physics in Taiwan" (by Wheijen Chang) in which the authors' experinces and perspectives in Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan are shared.  In the section of General Articles and Multimedia Resources, we have articles on multiple intelligence, analysis about studying Physics, IT database for General Studies and the website for the SAW project.  As the part two of the Special Section III in the last issue, we have the special section called "A collection of video clips for primary General Studies (P4~6)" (edited by Winnie So and Vincent Hung with over 600 Mega Bytes of video in 175 files) which should again be very useful for classroom multimedia teaching. As a new feature for this issue, there is a Portable Document Format (pdf) version for all contributed articles (except the special section) available for downloading and the articles in Chinese are further provided with the Simplified Chinese (GB) pdf files.

Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Prof. Agnes Shook Cheong Chang, Prof. Xingkai Luo, Dr. Greg Thomas, Dr. May Hung Cheng, Dr. K.K. Ho, Dr. Sing-lai Chan, Mr. Xiaojun Wang and Mr. Yuen-tan Lau for their valuable help in reviewing the contributed articles.  Thanks are also due to all those who have contributed articles in this issue  and all research assistants and colleagues in the HKIEd Science Department who offered their help in developing and promoting this online periodical.  Apart from the sponsors highlighted in the previous two issues, additional financial support from the School of Foundations in Education of HKIEd  is gratefully acknowledged.