More than 80,000 people attended the fair, which is coordinated by the Generalitat of Catalonia’s Department of Education of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge. It’s aimed at young people wanting to find out about continuing their studies at undergraduate and postgrad level after completing compulsory secondary education (ESO), and IBEC exhibited in the dedicated EspaiCiència alongside other local centres including the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN), the UB and the UPC. According to the coordinators, the current areas of study receiving the most requests for information by young people are medicine, primary education, and the various branches of engineering.
The stand’s ‘name that smell’ game, in which visitors sniffed different odor samples and tried to identify them, demonstrated the great extent to which the human sense of smell differs from person to person, and posters explained the mammalian olfactory process. The explanatory video of the BOND project, which is coordinated by Associate Director Josep Samitier and aims to develop an electronic nose based on the olfactory receptors to mimic the animal nose, was on show, and visitors could also play the Virtual Nano Lab game and become nanotechnologists themselves.
IBEC’s Communications and Outreach team would like to thank the staff and scientists that generously gave their time to man the stand during the week and over the weekend: Juan Fran Sangüesa, Miriam Funes and Marilia Barreiros dos Santos.
Watch news coverage of the event here:
http://www.btv.cat/btvnoticies/2012/03/21/arrenca-el-salo-de-lensenyament/ (36 seconds in)
http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/linformatiu/linformatiu-migdia-21-03-11/1355033/ (minute 12′)
