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

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 girl's experiences during the 2024 and 2025 editions of the workshop are also detailed, with the aim to contribute to the wider physics education research and outreach communities.