Cover image: The One that Shatters in the Air. Credits: Florian Voggeneder. Source: Flickr.com
Are you interested in science and would you like to experience first-hand the work of a scientist, guided by real scientists? Then sign up for the winter workshop Atomic Girls, which will take place during the winter holidays 2022!
Important dates:
Registration opens: Monday 2 May 2022
Closing date for registration: 23 May 2022
Limited places.
They are not the Powerpuff Girls: they are the Atomic Girls capturing muons in their homes. The fact that both the scientists who organise the workshop and the tutors are all women is no coincidence: it is specially designed to show that science is not a male-only field and that any of them could become a scientist. Logo credits: Maritza Piña.
They are not the Powerpuff Girls: they are the Atomic Girls capturing muons in their homes. The fact that both the scientists who organise the workshop and the tutors are all women is no coincidence: it is specially designed to show that science is not a male-only field and that any of them could become a scientist. Logo credits: Maritza Piña.
The "Atomic Girls" workshop will cover basic concepts in particle physics, electronics, programming and the scientific method, all of which are necessary for them to assemble and operate the muon detector. The five tutors who will work in the workshop, Mariel Poduje, Melanie Martínez, Suyay Huichacura, Devika Mukhi and Laura Martínez (undergraduate students in physics, undergraduate students in astronomy and PhD students in astrophysics at the Catholic University), will support the girls so that they can carry out their work in the best possible way.
During the training, the mentors received an introductory talk on particle physics, the objectives of the workshop and the work they will be doing. They also received hands-on training on the electronics of the muon detector by Roberto Pinto, an engineer at the Saphir Millennium Institute.
"Atomic Girls" is a workshop that seeks to stimulate interest in science in schoolgirls, but does not consider the fact that they decide to study physics as a success rate. According to Garay, what interests them is to provide tools that will be useful for any career they decide to study (programming and scientific method are cross-cutting knowledge) and to give them a taste of what real scientific work is like in a protected environment.
"If they decide to study something else, that's fine, but it should be because they choose to, not because of gender bias or because they don't know the real work in science. The idea is that the workshop will give girls interested in science the motivation they need to decide on a career in science," says Garay.
"An important aspect of the critical thinking and skills I hope the girls will develop in the workshop has to do with building resilience in discovering the world. How do I go on if the experiment failed? What if the results are not what I expected? This resilience also translates into a scientific skill that I think is very useful in life. [I want this to be the workshop that I as a child, and perhaps all of us, would have liked to have had," says Cottin.
In addition, the muon detector to be used in the workshop is based on an original design by Renato Galleguillos, associate researcher at Saphir and academic at the Universidad Andrés Bello, making it a completely Chilean design.