The Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia (mNACTEC) is staging an open day on Sunday, 15 November, along with a range of free activities, to celebrate Science Week 2015. Among the key initiatives this year are the family science workshops "Come and do science!" and "Experimental physics workshop" and the "Born with a curious mind" play area, intended for youngsters between the ages of 6 months and 3 years.
Science Week is staged each year, and this 20th edition offers a wide range of educational scientific activities all around the region. The mNACTEC will be staging an open day on Sunday, 15 November, from 10:00 to 14:30. The scheduled activities have limited capacity, and so prior bookings are recommended by emailing activitats.mnactec@gencat.cat.
PROGRAMME
→Babies section "Born with a curious mind"
Sunday, 15 November, from 10:00 to 12:00: a play area to encourage exploration, experimentation and discovery among babies aged between 6 and 12 months. The Moisès Municipal Nursery School is organising "born with a curious mind", a section intended for the very youngest visitors, allowing them to explore and investigate with all five senses. Touching, smelling, hearing… with materials and objects designed to encourage them on the road to discovering their surroundings and themselves.
→"Born with a curious mind" play corners
"Born with a curious mind" will also include a play area divided into different corners and intended for children aged between 1 and 3 years. This section has been turned into a free play area, lively and motivating, encouraging the natural curiosity of children to experiment, explore, investigate, discover and ask questions. The play area will be open on Sunday, 15 November, between 10:00 and 12:00, and will include five experimentation corners: sandpit, magnets, elasticity and weight, inclined plane and laboratory.
→Family science: "Come and do science!"
The workshop "Come and do science!" will be staged at 12:00 and is intended for children aged 7 years and up, to learn how to work with the scientific method. The participants will perform small-scale experiments of differing complexity depending on their level: a game of magical physics, with materials changing when they are mixed; ingenious time measurements; percentage of sugar in a piece of chewing gum, and optical investigations. The experiments will prompt the children to formulate hypotheses that they will need to prove, just like real scientists.
→Family science: "Experimental physics workshop"
At 11:00 and at 13:00 hours, children aged from 7 years upwards will have the chance to experiment in the Ferran Alsina physics laboratory. The participants will discover what an experimental physics laboratory was like at the start of the 20th century, and perform experiments allowing them to understand the reasons behind the physical phenomena that surround us, through the research into pressure, light and electricity conducted by Ferran Alsina in his experimental physics workshop set up in Tibidabo, in order to perform demonstrations of the laws of physics.
Science Week 2015
From 13 to 22 November, Catalonia will be celebrating the 20th Science Week, during which a whole host of activities will be staged to showcase science all around the region. Open days, exhibitions, talks, games, science workshops… a whole spectrum of possibilities open to all.
The central topics of this year's edition are light and soil, to mark the fact that 2015 is International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies and International Year of Soils. Science Week is an initiative coordinated by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation.
21 October 2015
