Cerdanyola del Vallès, 21st June 2021 With the end of the academic course 2020/2021, the end of ALBA Mission has come up too. Last January, 10-12 years old students faced the scientific challenge proposed by the ALBA Synchrotron: the ALBA Mission. As a novelty, this year the project has offered a new challenge named Discover the power of light, that joined the other one Make the invisible visible, available since 2019. This new challenge includes four new experiments linking up the light, the key element in a synchrotron, with other topics like: vision, material science, innovation or art.
All this content is available online at the website www.misionalba.es/en and the schools register is totally free. In each virtual laboratory (eight in total) the staff of ALBA proposes to the students one scientific enigma to solve. Kids have to investigate following the scientific process figuring out the solution of the question. In order to achieve the goal and complete the challenge, along the past weeks the classroom-teams have gone through the correspondent four experiments, depending on the challenge chosen. Finally, the 2021 Mission ended the last 8th of June with a live YouTube streaming as the finishing touch, where students were able to chat and make questions to the ALBA staff that guided them through the virtual labs during the mission.
This Mission 2021 has had many awards for the participants. At the eight raffles, celebrated at the end of each virtual lab, more than 160 T-shirts have been distributed among the schools; and eight videocalls have been done between ALBA guides and the winner schools. Moreover, the ALBA Mission Team has been willing that all of the participants had a detail and therefore more than 9.500 ALBA Mission bracelets have been send for each kid. The members of the ALBA Mission Community have increased over these three years, and nowadays it is shared around 25.000 kids!
The educational content included in the project have been specifically designed to work the scientific area gathered in the official curriculum from all different autonomous communities in a practice, significant and experiential manner. Beyond the scientific content as the main axis, the project is presented as transversal and interdisciplinary, with teamwork as one of the main and most important elements. Students highlight also this point: “I loved the experiments, I have learned a lot from the challenges and, above all, I have had a great time with my mates”, “I like the fact that the project is based on experiments, it has been a very cool way of learning science” ”and “What I liked the most was working as a team and discover that science is fun” in their words.
However, Mission ALBA keeps moving in order to improve its offer year after year. The project prepares more news for its 4th edition. In one hand, the linguistic offer expanses, and added to Catalan and Spanish, the students materials and the web will be also available in Galician, Basque and English. On the other hand, and additional teachers guide has been created for schools with Specific Needs of Educational Support. In that way, ALBA Mission pursues approaching science to all kids making it accessible for everybody. In words of the ALBA director, Caterina Biscari: “interest in science and technology births since very early stages” and this is the main motivation of this project that aims to “waking up the scientific vocation by considering the need of science for the society”.
Mission ALBA faces its 4th edition the next 2021/2022 school year full of enthusiasm and hopes to once again have the warm and successful reception it has received this year, despite some circumstances that have had to be sorted out, such as the numerous confinements of class groups due to the corona pandemic. In the words of a participating teacher, ALBA Mission involved: “the encouraging of the critical spirit and shows the importance of science for society. Bringing science closer to classrooms in early stages where content sometimes is abstract, it helps a lot. Another participant points out that the motivational factor of the project is a very positive element: "the fact of being organized by challenges makes the students very interested and motivated to know what the next experiment is about". They add that “ALBA Mission makes feel students part of something bigger; and, from both scientifically and pedagogically point of view, it illustrates and makes significant much of what we are learning in our classes."
The register for the next school-year is already open at the web of ALBA Mission, looking forward enrolling new schools, and at the same time, for enforcing the link with the veteran ones, which have been participating in ALBA Mission since the beginning in 2019.
ALBA Mission has been produced by Eduxarxa and counted with the collaboration of Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología. .
