The impact of a Science Club on scientific outreach: aurora borealis as an example

Abstract

Scientific dissemination in the educational field involves hard work for teachers in understanding their environment in the digital era, where there is a lot of inaccurate information on various topics that young people receive, so teachers must guide them beyond the classroom and institutional programs. For this reason, High School No. 15 of the University of Guadalajara created the Science Club, composed of teachers from different disciplines, encouraging critical thinking, creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration in students between 15 and 19 years old, who wish to expand their knowledge in different scientific areas, with personalized advice. An example of this was the presentation of the project “The dance of Eos and Boreas”, in a scientific festival organized by the Latin American Society of Science and Technology (SOLACYT), which dealt with the northern lights, explaining how they originate. In this way, the students learned what qualitative research with an explanatory scope is, in addition to the theoretical content, making prototypes (models) that allowed them to explain this phenomenon. This project provided a quality interaction between the teachers, the young students and the knowledge.