On Tuesday, 27 November 2018, we had a very special visit in our Institute: "the scientists" class formed by 24 six-year old students from "La Trama" school in Sabadell visited us. It was a fantastic visit. All the kids were very happy to become real scientists for a day, and to visit the laboratories, the clean room, the glove boxes, the microscopes and even to perform an X-ray diffraction experiment to discover what is sand made of.
Martí Gich, researcher at ICMAB, had previously visited "the scientists" class in their school. The kids were so impressed by what he explained them about atoms, molecules, and minerals, that they wanted to see the real place where scientists worked! So they decidied to come to our Institute.
It was a cold morning, but they were happy to come. First, Anna May gave a short talk introducing the Institute to them: where we are, what type of people work here, what we do, etc. Then, the group was divided in two: one group did a workshop about diffraction with Anna Crespi and Judith Oró, and the other visited the installations (AFM, Clean Room, Microscopes...) and the Matheroes with Martí Gich and Anna May.
The kids were really impressed when they saw the big electron microscopes, the clean room with the people dressed with labcoats, the gloveboxes... they wanted to touch everything and had questions all the time. In the workshop, they analyzed what type of minerals form the sand. They brought some sand, and with the X-ray diffraction analysis, they saw that sand was mainly made out of Quartz!
All in all, a very nice morning, in which "the scientists" became real scientists for a day! After the visit they told us that they really enjoyed it.
"M'ha agradat molt i m'ho he passat molt bé" - said one of the kids after the visit.
Thanks to Martí Gich for bringing to the ICMAB such wonderful visitors, and to all the staff for their collaboration!
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