Con Ciencia

  Con Ciencia is an organization creating a science kit, to teach about science, enviromental issues and gender inequality in the STEM areas.

Con Ciencia aims to create an easy and affordable “science kit” to get children involved in the STEM areas. This means that it has to be done through an efficient process, attaching this creation to the concept of “sustainable technology”. It also aims to help Uruguayan entrepreneurs, since there are a lot of initiatives that create products in a sustainable way. Moreover, this kit is also meant to be implemented  in a workshop, where the children can ask questions, learn about the STEM areas and exchange opinions. 

In simple terms, this kit would include pieces made of recycled materials, these pieces could be specifically made to be like a “puzzle” that the children can solve to create a functional structure that demonstrates a science principle. Meaning that the kit would have other useful pieces to make these simple experiments, and of course, the instructions and information printed in a simple way for every child to read and understand. 

One of the main objectives here is to ensure a sustainable supply chain, making use of technologies that provide recycled raw material to create this product.

It is known that in the region of south america girls tend to get away from these areas earlier in life, and start to lose interest as long as they grow in their studies (Report: “Cracking the code: girls' and women's education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)”). This issue has its cultural factor, which could be that girls are believed to be better at certain activities than don’t have something directly to do with science, technology, engineering or math. As the leader of Con Ciencia, during my last year of high-school of the physics-mathematics orientation we were only three girls among 16 men in our classroom. By the end of highschool, girls are already not showing interest in getting involved in these areas, especially math and physics. On a bigger scale, this issue results in women not being able to take part in various of today's world problems. Women's voices should be represented and heard equally, apart from any cultural beliefs that underestimate our capacity in the STEM areas.

Our target population is children. We recognize, in part, gender inequality in STEM areas as an issue that could be solved “from the start”, demonstrating to the children and their families that everyone is equally capable of doing science. With our solution, we want to make sure that every child gets to experiment with science and also learn about how important it is from them to stop the chain of cultural beliefs that imply that a gender is not good enough, or shouldn’t simply participate in certain activities. Apart from the “science view” of this idea, we plan on getting a view of social issues for these children to think and speak about, and of course getting instances for them, so they can spread what they learned to their communities and why not, they might solve a problem they have recognized. For us it is important that children get an experience of personal research and experimentation, learning about today’s world issues and of course encourage the girls to participate in the STEM areas later in life. 

 Con Ciencia project, is completely runned by young volunteer women across latin america, the idea is thought to be first developed here in Uruguay, with the uruguayan volunteers of the project, since I am the coordinator and founder, who is based here. We’ve been working through 2021 virtually, most of the volunteers were from Uruguay in 2021, however this year we’ve reached more countries in our team, which would definitely help us to reach more people. We’ve worked with Uruguayan professional women in STEM, sharing their work and opinions through our interviews in our Instagram account and our website, as well as with other similar initiatives based in Paraguay and Argentina. Even though we worked well in 2021, we think that we could expand our audience with our idea. In our team we have volunteers that have worked with children before in other volunteering opportunities, including myself, but it is true that we have not worked with children about the science topic. Nevertheless, we have contact with different primary schools of our communities, including the ones that we have attended to, we think that we could implement our solution there.

The technologies planned to use are those that reduce environmental risks, since the idea is the creation of a product, we aim to have an efficient supply chain. We plan to use industry technology, such as shredding plastics to create new products from plates cut made of these recycled plastics.

Since this isn't a solution that has not been launched yet, we plan to serve around 200 hundred children next year, meaning that we want to create 200  science kits.

We want to encourage children to take part in the stem areas, demonstrating that there should be no difference between any gender at the time of doing science. Also, we plan to bring the children closer to information of recycled products and environmental issues, as well as ensuring that children have the opportunity to be part of science in any way. 

To measure our impact we are planning to work along with the schools that the solution would be implemented with, since we could know how children are working with science after implementing our solution. Also, surveys are a good option, we don't want to leave families out, so their opinion would be useful too.

We think that financial barriers are the ones that could stop us from moving forward, however we don't think that it is something that we can't go through. On the other hand, legal barriers could also be an option for us, since we don't have experience in the area of creating a product meant for children.

Con Ciencia team's is formed by young volunteers, all of us are girls who have been related to science in the past, and this year we also count with the help of a volunteer who has already worked with children about science in her country, also, every volunteer has previous experience in volunteering and with the implementation of workshops with children. Thanks to this, we have contact with schools that we would like to implement our solution with, and also we have contact with professionals that could help us with the information of these workshops. It is also important that in our team we count with a volunteer who has previous experience with workshops of environmental issues and has been awarded in Uruguay for her work with the youth. 

As a seventeen-year-old, and the founder of Con Ciencia Project, I am deeply involved with gender inequality in the STEM areas, and I think that this prize, could be a key to implement my solution, since it would help to get the materials needed, and also to make the impact that we want to do, demonstrating that any gender is capable of working in the STEM areas and how important is to pay attention to environmental issues and start working on them.

The idea of our solution started thanks to the concern of gender inequality in the STEM areas, more specifically in Uruguayan primary and secondary schools. The prize would be used to help our communities to learn about why is it important to leave certain cultural beliefs behind as well as learning about science at the same time implementing our solution. We want to improve how children learn about science, environmental and gender issues. We would use this prize to create and implement our solution.