SFB 1083 in partnership with Chemikum Marburg supports Girls’ Day 2019

SFB 1083’s Ö-project closely cooperates with Chemikum Marburg e.V. by installing at its premises several new experiments and workshops providing hands-on insights into the SFB’s research objective and the study methods employed. In 2019, for a second time, the partnership supported Girls’ Day activities with dedicated offerings.

Girls’ Day 2019 with its 50 young (agegroup 10-16) female participants benefitted from these offerings, which included the application of acid-base-reactions, measuring thermal signatures of chemical reactions and electrical conductivity in various substances. The experiments provide insight into the central research aspect of SFB 1083: “What are the reactions taking place at the interface, that is the contact between two materials?”

“Girls’ Day allows us to showcase how researchers work. In interesting experiments and workshops we can entice enthusiasm for MINT-disciplines in female pupils”, state Prof. Stefanie Dehnen and Dr. Christof Wegscheid-Gerlach, director and co-director of Chemikum Marburg and principal investigators of SFB 1083’s Ö-project.

A special informatics-focused workshop, in cooperation with Michael Szabo (Fachdidaktik Informatik PUM/MLS), showcased how disciplines work together and how modern research needs detailed programming for optimal analytical results. The SFB’s Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), for example, needs a complex range of operational programming to realize its full potential. This was demonstrated using the Lego-model and it rapidly became obvious to the riveted audience how programming controls the instrument’s operation. 18 girls were then guided in developing their own little programs using the language scratch. At the end of the 3-hour workshop the young participants had all succeeded in letting their “dog run around the lake” and teasing out the impact of minor changes to their code.

See also a press release in German.