Hello, my name is Manuel Razo-Mejia
and I'm currently a grad student at
the California Institute of Technology.
Today I want to tell you about this
fantastic project called, Clubes
de Ciencia, Mexico.
This is a program aimed to improve
the science education in the developing world
through the creation of significant mentoring
networks. Science education in Mexico
is facing a huge challenge.
First of all, we don't have the educational
nor the financial resources.
And more specifically, we are now facing a
huge scarcity of trained science teachers.
Moreover, the science problems in the country
are not consistently being evaluated,
They usually have very limited learning goals.
And the good programs that do exist
in the country are very small,
so they can reach a very limited number
of students. That's why our goal
as an association is to expand the access
to high quality scientific education
in Mexico, and the way we're doing this
is by organizing a strong network of
grad students and researchers
all over the U.S. and Mexico.
And putting them in contact with students
in Mexico, so that they can both benefit
from this interaction. We provide
project-based science workshops
in different cities in the country.
And we are currently developing our
online platform that would allow
us to expand our reach.
We understand that people live in a context
and that they need opportunities to succeed.
Many Mexican grad students in the U.S.
constantly express their desire to improve
the situation back home, such as Alejandra
Quintanilla. But many times they don't have
an idea of how to do so.
On the other hand, in Mexico, we have
many, many very enthusiastic kids
willing to learn if given the opportunity,
such as the case of Juan Carlos Martinez,
one of our rockstar students,
that he participated multiple times in
our workshops. And I'm happy to say that right now
he's spending his summer doing research in a
neurobiology lab at UCSD.
In order to help students,
such as Juan Carlos, we're looking for
inspiration at very well established science
education programs. For example,
for our online presence, we're seeking to reproduce
the success of the massive online courses
that many of the top universities
in the world are now providing.
And for our hands-on experience,
we look up to programs such as NASA's
outreach science program, where
the students get a very rich introduction
to the experimental sciences.
That's how we came up with this
very simple, but very powerful,
scheme of how to implement our strategy.
Once our students are selected,
they go through an orientation phase
where we use our online platform
that we're developing in collaboration with OpenEdX,
where the students receive all the material that they
need as a prerequisite for the club.
During the week of the club, we fly the grad
students to the city where these kids are
and we have a one week long
workshop, very intense, between 8-10 hours
a day. And the topics that they learn are
ranging from developmental biology to astrophysics,
to pure math. And at the end, we organize
a small conference where the students get
to present what they learned during that week.
We're currently trying to improve our
follow up strategies, because we want to have
a very good local and long distance mentorship
in order to keep providing good material
for these students through our online platform.
And help them to achieve their goals.
So far, last year we organized 73 science clubs.
We educated more than 800 students
in 4 different cities in the country.
We have people participating from universities
based in the U.S. and based in Mexico,
and this is not limited to only Spanish-speaking
people. We have had instructors from Germany,
from Greece, from Chile, from China,
and we're always seeking from more
people willing to help us.
We're very happy to say that the
organization has grown really, really fast.
Only last year, in the winter of 2014,
we had 13 clubs with only 100 participants,
and this winter, we had 30 clubs in 4 different cities
with more than 1200 applicants and
400 participants. So we're very happy
that the organization is growing really fast.
That's why I want to invite you all to join
us in this science education revolution
in Mexico. We're always looking for
people that are willing to be an instructor,
to help us with the marketing, to help
develop material for our online website,
any idea that you have, please contact us
at our website -- at our email, sorry.
And visit our website to see all the cool material
that we have over there.
Thank you very much!