summer science factory

scientific workshops Motto: research it yourself!

split, čakovec and samobor 129 participants with 58 mentors worked in 24 different workshops (themes)

for youth from 8 to 18 Mainly primary school pupils

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Total number of participants In five years we had 305 participants on the workshops. Usually we have twice that number of applicants – this year we managed to accept all that applied.

Distribution by age Most of the participants go to primary schools. Number of their applications is rising so we plan more workshops targeted at them. High school workshops first started in and the number of participants in them stagnates at ~ 20/year

we work in small groups Every group performs a small guided inquiry project that lasts for a week

2011 workshops by discipline Workshops are mostly from natural science disciplines, but this year we had workshops from psychology. Many of workshops are interdisciplinary in nature, so the shown distribution is a rough estimate. Also the theme of specific workshops is not always the same as the area in which mentors are specialized.

Workshop themes in five years The number of workshops has risen in years, and so did the diversity of disciplines. Although the level of interdisciplinarity has always been high (especially in which was very mixed, the graph is an estimate) until workshops were mostly biological, but after the implementation of open call for mentor diversity has definitely set in.

who does all this? Students and young scientists develop and facilitate workshops.

What do they do in life? Mostly students (80%): 25 undergraduate (bacc.) 20 graduate (master) Others work in science, teaching and private sector: 3 phd students 3 high school teachers 3 scientist (have phd) 2 private sector Students study at University of Zagreb (34) and Split (11), but there was more interested students from Rijeka. They come from all parts of Croatia although most of them study in Zagreb.

... how it looked earlier The number of mentors is rising, and most of them are students It's seems that the number of "older" mentors is rising.

Gender distribution In the first two years the ratio was even (when we didn't have an open call for mentors). From onwards most of the mentors are female, so the average for last 5 years is 30/70

new ideas: projects defined by youth semester long projects and teacher integration better mentor education evaluation & research problems: funding distributed organisation "evaluating" motivation of primary school pupils