Second edition of “Engenharia e Ciência vão à Escola”
IPFN researchers visited schools in Lisbon from 24 to 28 November, offering hands-on interactive sessions for students during Science and Technology Week as part of Instituto Superior Técnico “Engenharia e Ciência vão à Escola” initiative.
For a 9th grade class at Escola Secundária Dom Dinis, the programme opened with “Plasmas: What Are They and How Can We Use Them?”, a session led by IPFN researcher Ana Amaral Dias. Using a plasma ball and a fluorescent lamp, she invited the students to reflect on what it means to be a scientist and shared her experience in the laboratory, before introducing plasma as the fourth state of matter.
A sample of graphene was passed from hand to hand to the students to show how plasmas can be used to create advanced materials. “Plasma-based processes use ionized gas (plasma) with reactive electrons, making it possible to grow thin graphene films with tailored properties”, Ana explained. These technologies drive innovation across fields, from waste conversion and clean energy generation to biomedical applications and cutting-edge nanotechnology.
At Externato do Parque, the PhD student Bernardo Barbosa conducted the session “How to Turn Light into Antimatter?” for the 4th grade students. As an introduction, they played an educational game to compare the value of materials such as coal, gold and antimatter. The last concept is considered valuable for being “extremely rare in nature and difficult to produce and to obtain in large amounts in a laboratory” he stated, emphasising that “as it very easily annihilates with regular matter, disappearing in the process”. To round off the session, Bernardo explained the basic operating principles of lasers.
“Why do we need 3D glasses to watch a movie?” was the question made by a 4th grade student to the PhD student Rafael Almeida at Escola Adriano Correia de Oliveira, summing up what the class had just learned in “What is Light?”. They wore 3D glasses while Rafael used polarising filters to show that light could be blocked or transmitted depending on its orientation.
“The glasses work on the same principle,” Rafael explained. “The cinema projector shows two overlapped images, with a different polarisation. Each lens only lets one of those versions through, so each eye sees a slightly different image and the brain combines them to create the 3D effect”. He concluded saying that “this was just one example of how light behaves” reminding the class that visible light is only a small part of the wider electromagnetic spectrum, applying the concept they had just learned.
Energy was at the centre of another visit. At the end of the week, 1st year PhD student Mário Vaz presented “Fusion: Hotter Than the Sun” topic to a 4th grade class at Escola Básica O Leão de Arroios. Using a Stirling engine, he showed how electricity can be generated through the movement of a magnet inside a coil, lighting an LED. Mário linked the example to tokamak reactors, whilst strong magnetic fields confine an extremely hot plasma so “fusion reactions can occur under controlled conditions, a process that future devices aim to harness for large-scale electricity production”.
“Understanding Energy and Nuclear Energy”, marked the final session of the programme to a 4th grade class at Externato do Parque, with IPFN president Bruno Gonçalves. The researcher explained the different states of matter and key notions of energy, before setting out the distinction between nuclear fission and fusion.
Bruno introduced the tokamak and placed it in the context of major international efforts such as ITER and ISTTOK, a research fusion device operated by IPFN at IST. “In Portugal we also have equipment dedicated to studying fusion,” he told the students and “many of the questions we are working on today may well be taken further by your generation”.
Over five days, the programme delivered more than 40 interactive sessions to around one thousand students from Lisbon, Loures and Oeiras, strengthening the connection between schools and the research at Técnico. IPFN was one of the research units involved, with activities that gave students hands-on contact with scientific concepts and sparked their interest in science and technology.
