We are so happy to be back for a new year of g4g fun and wonderful encounters! The start of our year went by in a blink, thanks to the wonderful 140 girls and boys we met in Belgium and the Netherlands in the last couple of weeks. For the first Saturday of February, we invited 20 girls and boys to join us in our beautiful Atelier, and discover everything there is to know about the eye, vision, and the science of biomimetics, while building cool inventions like a video projector, a microscope, and a hologram pyramid! A week after that, we launched for the first time in the Netherlands with our g4g Day in the Hague, and were thrilled to be joined by so many wonderful partners – from NATO to the European Medicines Agency, the European Space Agency, Women in Aviation, and much more – to make it a STEMtastic day! Finally, February was also the month we kick-started our new Global Scholarship Project, a campaign that will enable us to fund College education for 15 bright girls in India (more below).
Read all about our February below!
On February 1st, we were thrilled to host 20 girls and boys for our first makerspace of the year! Together, we traveled through biology, physics, and history in order to learn what biomimetics is and how it has helped inventors of the past, present, and future to create optical devices that have changed human life such as the microscope, the video projector, the 3D projector, and more! We dived into the physical laws of light reflection that enable us to create virtual image ; We discovered the biological characteristics of the eyeball and the physical law behind the functioning of an obscure camera… and even more fun, we became engineers and built three amazing optic devices : a microscope, a hologram pyramid and a video projector! Our favorite moments of the day? When we saw all the crazy faces these kids had in store for their holograms! And the “eureka” moment? When we realized that, if we were not screening a movie for a band of bats, we needed to put our cellphones upside-down in our new video-projectors!
On February 8th, we launched for the first time in the Netherlands with our g4g Day in The Hague! We blasted off from the beginning of the day as we heard from communication specialists, aerospace engineers, rocket scientists, police, and educators to remind all 120 curious girls that “the sky is quite literally the limit!” Surrounded by more than 40 role models coming from the British School in the Netherlands, NATO Communications and Information Agency, the European Medicines Agency, the European Space Agency, CoderDojo, Emerson, Women in Aviation in the Netherlands, and the Den Haag Police, the girls simply rocketed into science exploration. They had fun flying drones, patenting & approving medicine, coding with Scratch, exploring cyber forensics, extract human DNA, designing aerodynamic planes...and more! The day took place at the British School in the Netherlands with the warmest welcome from the school team.
Finally, on February 26th, we were thrilled to finally launch our new Scholarship project, as an attempt to empower young girls in India by giving wings for their dreams to take off. In 2013, thanks to our network, we managed to fund the college education of 8 Indian girls with exceptional academic records and dreams of pursuing a career in science. Today, these girls have finished up their degree, they are working or seeking further education, and we now want the program to reach new girls!
During the past few months, in India, we met with 15 exceptionally bright girls to our g4g Scholarship project, all curious and eager to learn, all of them coming from very low-income families and challenging backgrounds. Their wish is to go to college and become engineers, entrepreneurs, statisticians, teachers and more. And the great news is ... YOU can help them do just that! To read more about this fantastic project and see how you can help, read our post here!
And that’s how we concluded this month of February!
Thank you all so very much for reading, and we are looking forward to seeing you in March with new activities, new events, and new greenlight girls met around the world!
