Last week @geotecUJI celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science – February 11^th. Our colleagues Carlos Granell and Estefanía Aguilar gave different talks addressed to students at primary level (6 and 12 years old) and high school (15-17 years old).

Our #11F2019 tour started in CEIP Penyagolosa (Burriana, Spain) with a talk addressed to Primary students (1st course) in which we shown different profiles of man and woman scientists. We tried to introduce them not just female figures in Science, but also a range of scientific professions and careers. This talk was titled “How many interesting things scientists do!” and kids were very happy to get a scientist personalised accreditation.

After this awesome talk – not because of our humble contribution to the dissemination of Science, but because of the willingness of children to participate and ask questions without stopping– we moved to school’s auditorium to give the talk “Space is also a girls’ thing” addressed to 6th grade students (12 years). In this talk we introduced concepts about space, earth observation, and satellites, with particular emphasis on the role women have played and are playing in the Space race.

Since just one day is not enough for disseminating the importance of having women involved in Science and showing girls their potential to start a STEM career, February the 12th we went to IES Jaume I (Burriana, Spain) to give a talk titled “Breaking stereotypes!”. Two separate talks were given, first one addressed to High school students and the other one to Computer Science VET studies. Here the plot for the talk was organised in three parts: today’s scientific challenges require a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach, the importance of having women involved in scientific careers and the presentation of female scientists working in the GIS field as a reference. For the latter, we would like to especially thank colleagues and friends who sent us short videos explaining why they fell in love with Science. Thanks to Rusne, Águeda, Aida, Laura, Irene, Mauri and Nourhan. They all, especially the girls, were mesmerised attending to your videos!!

Simply because we find incredible free materials for preparing our talks, it is also fair to share ours. So, you can access to the ppts of the Talks [in Spanish] just clicking on their titles.

We have to admit it: it was our first experience of this kind. We learned a lot on how to disseminate scientific content to kids and young people, and we are eager to continue in this endeavour. As expected, we spent a great moment surrounded by these young (and future) scientists in training, which we will surely repeat next year!

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These activities were listed in the talks organised in Spain around this day #11F2019.

As a Copernicus Academy member with this initiative we are also contributing to building up a knowledge culture around the benefits and opportunities Copernicus programme brings to youth people.