On April 28, Técnico celebrated the International Day of Girls in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), with a set of activities that took place on the Taguspark Campus.

After the welcome session, three women starred in the panel entitled “Strategies for Girls in STEM Areas”. The objective was to reflect and present initiatives that can break the imbalance marked by the timid female presence in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics areas). One of these initiatives, presented by Professor Helena Galhardas, Vice President for Taguspark Campus Management, is the “Girls Stem project” that aims to empower boys and girls, particularly those in secondary education, to learn about and experience the different activities of the Technician in these areas STEM.

“This program demystifies what some girls and boys might feel when they are younger: that science, engineering and math are very complicated things, and they are not. In particular, some elements of the female world may have that feeling that they are not capable of doing it, but of course they will be able to do it and they will even be interested and curious”, guarantees the teacher.

In the same vein, Professor Ana Moura Santos made known the “Jornada da Heroína Aprendiz”, an educational narrative with a focus on the feminine where the heroines are urged to overcome challenges, which “consists of learning so-called difficult contents, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and showing that the journey is supported by many female figures, which will be easier for girls to identify with.”

To attract girls to Science, Joana Lobo Antunes, Coordinator of the Communication, Image and Marketing Area of Técnico, defended that it’s important to have examples and that “they take advantage of every opportunity to show that there are women in these careers and use models as example for others to follow.”

Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson are some examples of women who, through science, left a great legacy for humanity, a legacy that motivated artists Rodrigo Romano and Fernanda Victorello to honor them in the exhibition “ELÁS. BRUXAS”, inaugurated as part of this celebration on the Taguspark Campus.

The exhibition that brings together art, science and technology, will be open until May 11, paying tribute to women who, with their life path, broke obstacles and left important contributions in the most varied areas, until then, with strong male supremacy.

The first visitors to the exhibition were 60 students, girls and boys, from the basic education of the International Sharing School, in Porto Salvo. In addition to enjoying the art, young visitors participated in dynamics with robots, welding with arduino, spaghetti towers and gender social representation activities in STEM.

At the Robotics Laboratory, Mariana Sanches, like her colleagues, was fascinated by the experience of interacting with robots. For the 4th year student, who dreams of being a scientist when she grows up and builds robots, participating in this activity is part of the realization of a dream: “I want to be an inventor to create new things, new robots, that help the planet to develop faster in order to end global pollution”, he says with all conviction.

Meanwhile, in the central atrium, colleague Maitê Nocite is having fun building “spaghetti towers”. With firm hands and help from colleagues, the masses are taking shape: “when I grow up I want to be an architect and in our group we decided to make a beautiful house of pasta”.

The afternoon session started with the lecture “The Magical World of Technology has no shortcut”, presented by César Brod, Director of the LINUX Professional Institute (LPI). The public was made up of students from the 11th and 12th grades of the Amor de Deus School, who later had the opportunity to participate in the workshops and visit the art exhibition.

The closing of the International Girls’s Day ICT program was in charge of “Tuna Mista” from Técnico, which, in a mix of musical revelry and rhythms, including female and male voices, animated the audience and reinforced the message of the day that, whether in the arts or stem, there is always room for girls and boys.