The UAB and fifteen upper secondary school centres participated in the Small World Initiative
18/05/2018
“If we can achieve to stir up the passion in someone, that is already gratifying enough”, say Tamara and Sergi, two degree students from the UAB who visited secondary school centres to share, through on site laboratory practices, the importance of finding bacteria containig antibiotic activity. The student explained their experience to a room filled with students, their biology teachers, university stdents participating as project instructors, and participating UAB lecturers, all coordinated by Professor Montserrat Llagostera.
Two of the lecturers, Isidre Gibert and Maria Àngels Calvo, as spokespeople of the group, showed their appreciation for the degree of involvement demonstrated by students and centres and encouraged them to organise more of these types of activities. For Gibert the experience has taught him numerous things, in which students were able to discover first-hand that research consists of its daily “failures and occasional rewards”, and were also able to become aware of the fact that “science requires a lot of consistency”. Calvo highlighted the importance of traveling to the centres where "we once again became students, and learned new things in the lab", as well as building a bridge between the university and the students at the centres they visited.
UAB students visited a total of fifteen different centres to show students how to conduct experiments with the aim of isolating antibiotic-producing bacteria. “The project impressed us, and we are now interested in the world of science”, explains one student in representation of the Mont Perdut centre in Terrassa, while a student from the L’Estatut centre in Rubí pointed out the “the simple fact of contributing to an advance in science, even if minimal”, and informed that their centre was preparing a dissemination campaign to share with other students.
This activity forms part of the participative project Small World Initiative, an initiative created by the University of Yale in which more than 12 countries participate. The activity is addressed to the educational community with the aim of fostering an interest for science by exploring the diversity of microbes and the search for microorganisms capable to producing new antibiotics. The project's objectives is to improve the amount of information made available to citizens and raise awareness of the resistance harmful bacteria has to the existing antibiotics.
Project website:
http://pagines.uab.cat/swiuab/ca