Last week was the International Day of Girls and Women in Science and the GEOTEC group prepared some activities to celebrate it and spread the word among school children. Our colleagues Carlos Granell and Aida Monfort visited the CEIP Penyagolosa (Burriana, Spain), and gave a talk to four groups at the primary level. Update: The school has posted too.

In the first two groups (6-7 aged, 1st grade), our colleagues introduced themselves and the work they do, linking it to concepts such as ‘asking questions’, ‘working in groups’ or ‘being curious’. Children were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, and although most of the answers were ‘policemen’, ‘football player’ or ‘teacher’, we were surprised that some of them said ‘scientists’. The children were then given their own ‘Scientist’s Notebook’ to start writing down all the questions they thought a scientist could answer. They were very excited and started to write questions that intrigued them in their notebooks.

Lastly, we presented 6 women, born in Burriana or nearby, who had/have done important tasks such as being an internationally renowned artist, scientists or the first police inspector women in the town. Children played a memory game about these women, flipping over two cards at a time to pairing each woman with an object that identifies her. They had fun a lot!

In the other two groups (10-11 aged, 5th grade), our initial presentation included real examples of applications and projects we work in at GEOTEC. One of the slides included a map representing which streets were named after a woman and which were named after a man. By asking the children to raise their hands, they quickly discovered that there were many more streets named after famous men than after famous women. 

The Burriana map below was generated with the scripts provided by the geochicas project ‘Las calles de las mujeres’.

Another slide featured 6 female pioneers in science and schoolchildren recognized some of them. Children were then arranged in groups of 5 and given instructions and materials to play a ‘escape box’ game. The materials consisted of a decoder circle, a red magnifier, a deck of cards, and three pages with information and some hidden clues. By using the clues, they could decrypt the messages and uncover one of the six women seen earlier. They had a lot of fun and also learned about the day of February 11 and about some women who were important in their fields and in science in general.