Five physics, astronomy and astrophysics students had their first training today to become mentors for female high school students who will learn how to detect muons at home and at school. The "Atomic Girls" workshop aims to provide cross-cutting tools that will help girls in whatever career they decide to study... Although it would be wonderful if they chose a scientific career, say the scientists leading this initiative.
By Jorge Román
The Physics Institute of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile hosted today the first training of the tutors of the "Atomic Girls" workshop, which will be held during this year's winter holidays.
"Atomic Girls" is an initiative promoted by two researchers from the Saphir Millennium Institute, Francisca Garay (an academic at the Catholic University and alternate director of Saphir) and Giovanna Cottin (academic at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and young researcher at Saphir), which seeks to teach computational tools and basic concepts about scientific work to middle school girls. Through the assembly and experimentation with a detector of muon detector detector, the girls will have to make measurements on the incidence of muons on the surface, take notes of their findings and write a scientific report with these data. The final product of the workshop will be the aforementioned report - in which they will report the results of their experiments - as well as the muon detector itself and an arduino, which they will be able to reuse in their schools.
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.