"Ni\~nas At\'omicas" (Atomic Girls): An initiative that generates opportunities for young girls in STEM
Giovanna Cottin, Francisca Garay

TL;DR
The 'Niñas Atómicas' initiative engages high school girls in Chile in hands-on physics experiments, fostering critical thinking and scientific skills through building muon detectors and analyzing particle data, promoting gender diversity in STEM.
Contribution
This paper introduces a novel workshop combining particle physics, electronics, and programming to empower young girls with practical scientific experience and data analysis skills.
Findings
Successful implementation of the workshop over two years.
Girls collected and analyzed muon data, learning scientific methodologies.
Insights gained can inform future physics education and outreach efforts.
Abstract
We report on an initiative that seeks to encourage high school girls to develop critical thinking and transferable skills widely used in scientific work, as well as to generate a concrete space of opportunities for girls to experience how real science is done. Our "Ni\~nas At\'omicas" workshop combines the teaching of particle physics, electronics, programming and scientific methodology through building and operating a dedicated experiment: a muon counter. Girls from all over Chile can apply to this workshop, where every year they are guided by female scientists for two weeks. We report on the contents and methodology of our workshop and provide details on how to build the muon detector. We report results on muon flux and proper lifetime, two muon properties which can be extracted from the data collected by the girls with the muon detectors they built themselves. Insights into the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNeutrino Physics Research · International Science and Diplomacy · Computational Physics and Python Applications
