On Sunday, April 2, the Museum of Sciences of Valencia hosts the XVIII edition of the EXPERIMENTA Fair-Contest of Experiments and Demonstrations. The event, organised by the Faculty of Physics of the University of Valencia, is a science festival that brings physics and technology closer to secondary school students and the general public in a creative and participatory way. Simultaneously with the fair (between 10 am and 1 pm) the children’s workshop Fisicalàndia will be active. Prizes will be awarded from 1:30 p.m.
300 people, including students and teachers, are expected to participate in the fair-contest. With free access, it will host 66 stands, with different experimental STEM projects developed by students from ESO, Baccalaureate and training cycles, with the help of the teachers who tutor them. The public will be able to ask about the operation and the foundations of any of the experiments. At the same time, girls and boys will be able to approach the Physics workshop, to build and understand simple demonstrations based on natural phenomena.
Experimenta, in addition to the fair, includes a competition for the best projects and the project most voted by the public. A jury made up of university and secondary school teachers will evaluate the good functioning, the correct understanding of the works and the clarity of the explanations. There will be five prizes: four of 300 euros for each category of the competition according to the cycle of studies, and one of 200 for the project most voted by the public visiting the fair, as well as different honourable mentions.
The coordinator of Experimenta is Chantal Ferrer Roca, professor of Applied Physics and Electromagnetism at the University of Valencia, and the organising committee is also formed by Jordi Vidal Perona, Miguel V. Andrés Bou and Amparo Pons Martí. “We also have a large number of voluntary collaborators from the faculty (60) and 30 members of the jury are University and secondary school teachers”, points out Ferrer.
The works must be experimental and are classified into two types: demonstrations and experiments and, on the other hand, technological application projects. In the explanations, students (individually or in groups of up to four) must highlight the relationships between natural phenomena and technological applications, explaining the physical principles on which they are based.
The events will end at 1:00 p.m., and from 1:30 p.m. the award ceremony will begin, which will take place in the Santiago Grisolía auditorium of the Valencia Science Museum preceded by a short scientific show. At a later date, an exhibition of the awarded projects will take place, in which videos of the students explaining them will be recorded. The videos and accompanying materials will be published as educational and outreach materials on the Internet, to spread the work of secondary schools and to encourage other groups to do experiments and enjoy science first-hand.
The Experimenta fair has the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (FECYT-MICIN) through a competitive project, the Science Museum of Valencia, the City Council of Valencia, the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and the Royal Spanish Society of Physics, among others. Within the University of Valencia, in addition to the Faculty of Physics, the University Incorporation Delegation, the Equality Unit, the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit, and the Permanent Training Service collaborate.
More information on the Experimenta fair-contest:
https://go.uv.es/experimenta/fira
Instagram, Facebook i Twitter @Fira Experimenta #Experimenta23
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