Night science co-opetition: an international student contest  to engage citizens into research by learning by questionning, playing and doing

Vision

Learning by practicing true scientific research provides invaluable experience as one gets not only the classical scientific knowledge that is produced by what François Jacob called “day science”, but also the thrill of “night science” that only the exploration of the unknown can provide. Unfortunately, too few people have access to such experiences as research is mostly conducted in the few places that have the resources and trained faculties.

Interestingly, different innovative initiatives focus on promoting inexpensive and easy-to-realize “hands-on experiments”, “citizen science”, “crowd sourcing for research “ and “scientific discovery games”. These changes of educational practices make night science accessible to anyone connected to the web and allow even the youngest children to contribute to scientific research.

As scientists and educators involved in such processes we have decided to help the next generation that wants  to innovate in that framework. So we launched an international open source contest in order to identify and support innovative ideas that engage everyone in research by questioning, doing and playing.

This contest will included topics that are targeted to priorities defined by the organizers and more open topics where any student is invited to propose innovative ideas that can foster new modes of discovering “night science”.