Date: January 30, 2012

Title: Science Outreach: A Love Story

Podcasters: Lourdes Cahuich

Links: http://musingsfromthecosmicshore.net , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLxBjRjwf4Q

Description: The tale of a Mexican girl whose life was changed because science outreach.

Bio: Computer engineer with a master degree in telecom. management, in love with astronomy since 13 and commited with astronomy and science outreach.

Sponsor: This episode of the “365 Days of Astronomy” podcast is sponsored by — NO ONE. We still need sponsors for many days in 2012, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.

Transcript:

Greetings!

My name is Lourdes Cahuich, and I want to talk to you about Science Outreach, but let me first begin by telling you a story.

Our story began …

A long time ago, in the 80’s a new show arrived to the Mexican TV that would change the life of thousands of people around the world.

Among them a 13 year old Mexican girl, while changing channels on the TV (in a time before remote control) found an image that changed her life…

“A man with a brown jacket and blue shirt was in front of a prism, at the back there was a gray circle representing the planet Venus”

“He explained how the light reflected by Venus -when analyzed- could show precisely which chemical elements were present in the atmosphere of that planet”

The girl, in ecstasies, engraved those images deep in her mind.

While watching that show -during the next few months and years- her mind was opened to knowledge and understanding to the Universe, but above all, to the main tool for that: Science.

By watching the TV show “COSMOS” the girl found her passion: astronomy

Like her, thousands of people around the world felt inspired and found their true vocation to pursue science and engineering.

“Science outreach is a love story that, when shared, could change lifes in unexpected ways”

But, What is science outreach?

Science outreach is a way to bring science for the understanding of people, it has three main ingredients:

Science, our “main ingredient”

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Science is the best way to know the Cosmos. It allow us to have technology, which provide us with several important things like: Energy, Quality of life and Long time survival. But most of all, it give us a way of understanding the world around us!

Popularizers translate sciences for the understanding of people by doing science outreach (our delicious recipe!). It can be done using different media, as a way of sharing knowledge with the responsibility of doing a very good translation of science, showing the science’s beauty, and provoking reflection. But most important: making science accessible.

By the way, the “COSMOS” TV show achieved this goal in a tremendous and world wide way!

It’s important to have ethics while doing a science outreach activity, it’s not cool to mis-informing instead of informing

Outreachers should design their activities appealing to people, but we have all different kinds of people: kids, youngsters, adults. We have people self taught, with elementary education and with college education. We have people with different social backgrounds, but most important: with different life experiences.

When planning an outreach activity we have to design it thinking about the people we’re going to have as a public.

A good outreach activity should: raise awareness among the public, promote critical thinking, provide tools to improve the future, and last but not least, be the source of inspiration for the next generations of scientific and engineers.

…And what happened to the girl of our story?

Even though the girl wanted to be an astronomer when she grow up, could not realize that dream.

Instead she became a computer engineer and decided to use her skills and abilities to bring science to as many people as possible, and maybe help to ignite the spark of passion for science in someone else…

During her adult life she has collaborated with many organizations and projects, also developing her own materials to bring astronomy closer to people, specially kids.

Almost without being aware, she began outreaching

She wrote tales and astronomy materials for kids, among them a tale about a city girl that has never seen the stars. Organized a video-conference at a pre-school, where 5 year old kids could lear about Mars and talk and make questions to an astronomer that was on another city.

She is a volunteer translator for many astronomy and science outreaching websites like astroseti.org, seti.org, ted.com (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, which has a wide variety of talks and topics that, as it motto says “are ideas worth sharing”, and khanacademy.org (this one is an on-line educational project with video tutorials about science topics designed to help students around the world).

She also is working in several outreach projects like “latierrahabla.org” a project of the SETI Institute in which people can answer the question “If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, should we reply, and if so, what should we say?”, and most recently she is part of the first team in Mexico City to organize Science Cafes, called “Café de la Ciencia” that are informal and relaxed gatherings that take place in coffee shops and bars, in which the public cant learn, talk and discuss about a scientific topic with researchers and specialist in the area.

During all these years she has known several people from whom she has learned and grew up as an outreacher and, most important as a person.

Although she had also been disappointed by people trying to take advantage of her work.

Outreach does not only gives a great satisfaction to the people involved. It also has some “side effects”

Knowing people to share points of view, having contact with scientists and researchers. Learning amazing things, find friendships to last beyond time and geographical frontiers.

Despite that girl could not become an astronomer, she realized that her love for astronomy was a story worth sharing, because when one is in love, one can not help to not shout it out to the world.

And maybe from all those “science seeds” dispersed by her (and many other people around the world -including you listening to this podcast) arise the scientists that would change the course of human history and help us reach the stars.

Thank you!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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