Children’s Universities open up the doors of universities and research organizations. But those doors are mostly closed nowadays for everybody. Not only for children but also for adult students and university staff because of the Corona virus. Consequently, many Children’s University events have been postponed. We don’t know when we will be able to gather again in larger groups for running workshops and lectures and for bringing children to the universities.
Many of us will try to use the forced break of our programs to develop new material to engage children in science, arts and humanities or even search for new conceptual formats to do so. Some already started to dig through the archives at their servers and hard discs or even the hard copies collected in dusty binders to retrieve some of the good stuff we almost forgot about. These could now be useful for online learning and alternative ways of engagement.
Instructions for hands-on experiments, old lecture transcripts, video documentations of workshops,… there are unearthed treasures in our offices and we could use them now to support all the children and young people in home-schooling situations. Let’s create together a virtual and global Children’s University the best we can.
Of course, most of your new and old material will be in your first language and not fitting for all of us. But we can spread ideas and useful material anyhow and see what’s coming up. Maybe there will also be time and support in our group to translate some material.
As a first example we already shared on our fb-page a translation of çocukistanbul from Turkey of a wonderful work by Pleiadi from Italy, who created a guide for children to understand the Corona Virus. This guide is already available in many languages at the website of the Children’s Museum of Verona.
If you want to share your material and your optimism with children, we would be happy to support this. As European Children’s Universities Network we will collect your ideas and materials to share it in this extraordinary and challenging situation. Please contact us or share your links on our fb-page. We will also link to resources that specifically address the COVID-19 for children and news in the context of research.
We hope you all stay safe and we will all restart soon with even more inspiring (washed) hands-on activities at our Children’s Universities.