Presentation from the SiS Catalyst and EUCU.NET Technucation conferernce at the University of Porto, 28th November to 1st December 2013. Workshop A - The Content.

1. www.universidadedascriancas.org

2. Where do we come from?
Federal University of Minas Gerais, city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil

3. Débora d’Àvila Reis
(Institute of Biological Sciences and Museum of Knowledge),
undergraduate medical students,
and Mateus di Mambro (undergraduate student of rom the School of Fine Arts)
The year of 2006 – the begining...

4. Our original aims:
• Medical students wanted to be with children and talk to them about
issues related to the human body
• Mateus (student from the School of Fine Arts) wanted to practice
working at the science/art interface
• I had an educational challenge: shifting children from the position of
mere receptors of information to producers and debaters of their
own doubts

5. Who we are
From the third year of the project onwards, undergraduate students
from different areas (Fine Arts, Medicine, Comunication, Social
Sciences, Biological Sciences) and also Professor Maurício Gino
(Institute of Fine Arts) and Cristina d’Ávila (Scholl of Education)
were integrated to the project
Children (7-12 years old), not only from schools located in Belo
Horizonte, but also from rural areas of the state of Minas Gerais
*** Collaboration of Educational Radio of UFMG

6. • We meet kids at school, we talk with them about science, about the
relevance of question in the mainspring of science… and invite them to
take part of the project
• Children send their questions to us
• The issues are discussed between interns (undergraduate and
graduate students) and UFMG researchers
(for about 3 months)
• We return to the school and stay there for 4-5 days
• Workshops
• Questions and answers are recorded
audios (broadcast at BH and rural areas)
short animations
Methodology

7. • The disclosure of the voice and image of children
is pre-approved by their relatives or tutors, by
signing an appropriate consent term

8. Workshops
The questions presented by the children, in their socio-
cultural context, should be considered the guiding element
for the conception of the hands-on activties

9. What do the children want to know?
It depends...
But some questions are recurrent

10. Why was I made with this color?
Image workshop

11. Why was I made with this color?
Image Workshop
The history and rise of the brazilian people

12. How do I hear?
Why do I feel hunger?
How can I feel smell?
Senses Workshop
Sensorial system, neurons, nerve structure, hypothalamus,
Homeostasis systems
Stimulating the tact
Why do I feel pain?

13. Important!
The hands-on activities should follow
certain assumptions:

14. 1- The believe that children have a great capacity
for complex thought
The issues should be discussed in depth, without
simplifications
Special attention should be taken with the language and
the employing of analogies

15. 2- The valuing of previous knowledge of each child
During the workshops more questions arise…
comments, stories of life…
Adults and children exchange ideas and experiences.
They have the opportunity to raise hypothesis, propose ways of
addressing them, make deductions and express feelings related to the
discussed issues.

16. 3- The emotion
To all participants of the project, the workshops represent
moments and spaces of living and getting emotional with
science

17. What have you done here?
I’ve painted masks
I’ve watched short animations
I’ve worked with a real brain
No response
Human body model
Microscope
Sense workshop
Lectures
by Yurij Castefranchi

18. What would you like to do again?
Painting masks
Watching videos
The real brain
Human body model
Sense workshop
Microscope
Other activities

19. - The children actively participate on the project,
alongside researchers, undergraduate and graduate students.
In this sense, the project’s products
(audios and short animated films) could be
considered as a result of a co-creation
process

20. the website
• To disseminate the products (videos, texts, short videos)
• To amplify the space of interaction
• Stablish a two-handed communication channel among children and
project team and also an inclusive space with several nodes, from
which children, parents, teachers and academic community could
take part.
• In this space, everyone should be communicators in potential:
through the sending of questions, answers and testimonials.

22. Why do fingernails grow?

23. Why do we have teeth?

24. What we have observed so far
** The website has contributed to the construction of child’s self-esteem
The child can hear her/his own voice, and she / he can places
her/himself as a science communicator, and also as a cultural
productor.
**However, in the website, we haven’t managed to break with the
traditional pedagogical-communicational model yet.

25. Future goals
• What do children living in Portugal want to know about the human
body?
• And the children from Finland? from France? from the USA? from
Netherlands?
• And the Brazilian kids from Kaxinaua tribe, who live at the north of
Minas Gerais state?
• The intention is to receive recorded questions from children living in
other states of Brazil, from other cultures and soon also from other
countries. So they could change questions and perceptions about
the human body and also enrich the website with different sonorities
(voices from different parts or the world)

26. Finally, we want to highlight the fact that this brazilian Children’s
University, doesn’t intend to forsake the activities that don’t involve the
exclusive employment of the website. We’re fully conscious that the
contact with children, through our workshops, has a great capacity of
arising the curiosity for scientific knowledge, which can be
complemented by the website.
I

27. Financing support

28. Obrigada!

29. How is it inside my body?
Where is the air located inside my body?
Why do we snore?

30. “Diving inside my body”
The human body
on playing dough

31. What is the addiction?
Why are some people addicted to smoking?
• Biological aspects of the addiction:
• Brain structure, limbic system, rewarding system
The brain in playing
dough

32. Why are we different from the animals?
Why do we have hairs in our body?
Evolution theory, natural selection
Brain cortex evolution
plaster masks, planisphere showing the
diversity of phenotypes