By Chris Gary and Cyril Dworsky
How eucu.net members marked the International Day of Children’s Universities 2026
On and around 11 April 2026, children’s universities across the eucu.net network opened their doors — physically and digitally — to mark the International Day of Children’s Universities. What emerged was a vivid snapshot of what this network does every day: bring curiosity to children, and children to science, arts, humanities and knowledge in general.
To set the tone for the day, we released a short animated film with the invitation to Imagine your Future! The video intends to introduce into something we believe in deeply: that Futures Literacy, the capacity to imagine and use diverse futures, is not an abstract skill but something children practise naturally when they are given space to wonder. Watch the video here!
The activities documented by members offer just a – necessarily incomplete – glimpse of a much larger whole. In Finland, schoolchildren posed their most pressing questions about nature to university experts – live, in front of an audience and a streaming platform. In Latvia, children chose between drones, 3D modelling, and aviation fundamentals at a dedicated curiosity centre. In Belgium, a full day of eight workshops ranged from astrophysics to migration and social biases – with dedicated sessions for parents alongside those for children. In Poland, chemistry and physics departments opened up to 200 students over two days. In Portugal, Easter holidays became an extended invitation to explore geometry, cells, ecosystems, and the science of toys. In Switzerland, a chemistry workshop was paired with a family event and reached thousands more through social media. In Turkey, a bilingual early childhood project brought English-language science play to young learners week after week. In Kazakhstan, a multi-day exhibition showcased student creativity alongside popular science lectures. And in Egypt, a cross-border student exchange brought together young researchers from two countries for a week of workshops and cultural discovery.
One moment that stayed with us came from a lecture on the history of computing – a talk that took children on a journey through early machines, algorithms, and logic, from Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing, to the point where they were holding visual representations of binary numbers in their own hands. What made it particularly resonant: the lecturer had himself been a student of a children’s university eighteen years earlier. A room full of raised hands, and a story that had come full circle.
Across all of these activities, some patterns stand out: the creativity in format; the breadth of topics; and above all, the shared conviction that children deserve access to serious, joyful, and inspiring encounters with knowledge – and that the questions they ask today matter for the futures we will all inhabit.
Not all members were able to log their activities – and many more events happened across the network that are not captured here. That is not a gap, but a reminder: the work of children’s universities is constant, and the IDCU is just one moment when we make it collectively visible.
To every organisation that took part – thank you. And to those we didn’t hear from this time: we’d love to know what you did. The story of this network is written by all of us.
#IDCU #futuresliteracy
Screenshot of a stop motion video made by young students for the IDCU at the Universidade Junior in Porto