SCI's 2021 Online Edition
We have selected our cohort of instructors for our first international edition!
Stay tuned for future opportunities
General Description
Science Clubs International (SCI) has the mission to spark a social transformation by expanding access to high-quality STEM education and collaborative, international networks. We aim to expose students to scientific-educational experiences in an international environment.
We are organizing our first online edition of SCI, which will be a 4-day long (February 27-28, March 6-7) intensive event of eight free online workshops (clubes) for high school and college students in Iberoamerica. All students and instructors will be selected from a pool of applicants of former participants in Clubes de Ciencia: all countries and editions are included!
Our first international edition has a couple of twists. First, it’s all online, due to COVID, second, our students and instructors are scattered in eight countries, in multiple time zones and we have Spanish, Portuguese, and English speaking participants. We will also organize pre and post activities to encourage all participants to get to know each other. Finally, we will have a student fair where participants, in teams, will have the opportunity to showcase what they learned (video, ppt, webpage, poster, etc.).
Application Instructions
We are looking for instructors that meet the following requirements:
- Graduate student, postdoctoral researcher or young scientists that have been previously an instructor in Clubes de Ciencia.
- Extensive experience in teaching, mentoring
- Experience with online instruction is desirable
- Experience teaching students in multiple languages is desirable (e.g. Spanish and
English, Portuguese and English, all three languages!).
Selection
- Applicants will propose an idea regarding a virtual club.
- A committee will evaluate the applications on a rolling basis, the sooner you apply the better, and will select 8 ideas and the corresponding 8 instructors to co-lead the virtual clubes.
Furthermore, between 8-16 additional instructors will be selected to be part of one of the 8 teams. Each team of instructors will be responsible for delivering a Club. We will take into account the representation of all countries, gender, languages, and fields.
Responsibilities of selected instructors
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Work with teammates to design and implement a 4 day-long multidisciplinary workshop-
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Meet the deadlines marked by the organizing team regarding the workshop plan, learning objective, syllabus, materials, and software requests.
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Being available during the event via slack
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Being available before and after the main event for short additional activities such as Science Cafe, career advice panels, etc.
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Being available in the range of times for synchronous events (see below)
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Complete the evaluation at the end of the program
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As an instructor of this international edition of SCI you should take into account that attendees to the Clubes are high school and college students that previously participated in Clubes de Ciencia, with an estimated age of 17-23, highly motivated and curious coming from eight different countries. Different time zones and languages will be an additional challenge. You will be assisted by co-instructors as well as volunteers, coming from all-time zones/countries, who will help with the organization, zoom calls, technical problems, finding information, etc. Moreover, high-school teachers, from all-time zones/countries, will work as facilitators during the workshops and will be learning strategies to incorporate into their classroom.
Clubes Topics
To sponsor this event, we obtained a grant from the American Society for Cell Biology, thus we highly encourage topics in the realm of biology and its intersection with biological sciences.
Having said that, multidisciplinary topics are encouraged. We are aiming to have four computational and four experimental Clubes. We have access to material and small equipmentsuch as miniPCR and foldscopes for online demos in case you can use them in your lessons.
Platform, technologies
Take into account that as this event will be virtual, we will be using several online tools for communication and teaching, for example:
Video Conferencing - zoom
Messaging - slack
File sharing - google drive
SCI platform
Support for Instructors
a) Meetings 1:1 and/or SCI with all instructors
b) Guidelines for activities (synchronous, asynchronous)
c) Workshop with tips, opportunities to do mockup teaching
What does the event look like?
We are still detailing the agenda but we are considering to include the following activities
1- Pre-Clubes Activities (e.g. webinars, Meet and greet sessions, etc.)
2 - Opening Ceremony - Intro to the event, instructors, and Clubes. Opening remarks and
welcome intervention by key people and keynote speakers. - TBD
3- Online Science Clubs
Dates (4 days long): February 27-28 and March 6-7
Format:
Asynchronous webinars
Synchronous* sessions for Q&A, hands-on demos, guided experiments
Asynchronous Q&A via messaging
Asynchronous homework, exercises
* What are the actual reasonable time windows that we have for synchronous activities in
this event?
PST: 8 am to 12 pm
CST: 10 am to 2pm
EST: 11 am to 3 pm
Spain: 5 pm to 9 pm
4- Closing ceremony with students - video presentation - TBD
5-- Post Clubes Activities (e.g. Science Café session