 So, first of all, I would like to make two sort of disclaimers. The first one is I was invited to give this talk yesterday afternoon, so I had literally like less than 24 hours to prepare it. So sorry. The second one is this includes almost no data. I think there's literally one data visualization that I will include, and I will not talk a lot about data. Because this is something that is sort of happening in parallel to the CSB Conf. And it's an initiative that I really love, and I just really wanted to talk about it. So I am the CEO of a very small NGO called Lectures Without Borders. Our aim is to connect scientists and schools around the world. So I guess we all agree that science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the education of this in school from a very young age is important for kids. But I guess we also all agree that there's high inequalities on the level and the quality of the STEM education that people can get depending on their gender, depending on the socioeconomic background, depending on their geographic location. At the same time, we know that teachers are making huge efforts in trying to make STEM subjects interesting for kids. In project-based learning, using materials that they have access to, and at the same time, academic institutions are trying to make STEM more, to basically make it more approachable for kids by organizing things like science's wonderful festival or things that are aimed specifically for kids and adolescents. The problem with these things is they are not as accessible as we would like them to be. On the one hand, academic institutions themselves have limited resources for organizing these things in terms of even having a physical space, having the money to set up a whole festival for kids. It's really not easy. Also time constraints for both the academic institutions, the schools that maybe cannot block a full day for the kids to attend one of these things. At the same time, for many schools, even if they had the time, these things happen very far away from what they are. I grew up in a place that doesn't have academic institutions because it's a small town. If I had to attend any of these things, we had to block two full days. First, we needed to go somewhere, we needed to sleep there. This is something that only very rich schools could do. It's a bit like there's still a lot of barriers to it. This also perpetuates inequalities not only in access to STEM education, but also in general, the possibility of kids to eventually consider becoming scientists. Lectures without borders, which we have ever been livable, will try to at least contribute a little bit in trying to solve, to lower these barriers. Our equation is pretty simple. Whenever a scientist is traveling somewhere to attend a conference to visit their family, whatever they're doing, they tell us where they're going. We find a school in their destination that is willing to host them for a lecture, and we coordinate a lecture that happens during the school day. The initiative started in 2017 with four friends that were three of them were scientists. One was a school teacher, and when two of them, one was traveling to Nepal, another one was trying to Indonesia, both of them said it would be really cool if we could go to school there. They started to reach out to their friends and family, and happened to find a school in Indonesia and a school in Nepal. This network started growing from there, basically. Today, after, well, I don't know how many years, we are over 400 scientists. We have over 1,000 schools, and we are presented in 54 countries. Since 2020, because of the pandemic, we also started offering webinars whenever scientists are not traveling, and our schools cannot host them in person. These webinars have allowed us to reach, well, especially during the pandemic, thousands of schools. A lot of scientists also started reaching out and interested in participating in webinars and even beyond the pandemic, because maybe they are not actually traveling, which is perfectly fair. Not everyone travels, and so we kept doing these things even after COVID. This is what I promised, one graph, of how the number of our lectures grew over time. Not only the number of lectures grew, but also because of the webinars, the reach of our lecture grew a lot, so now we are organizing around 10 lectures a month, and each lecture stopped being for like 10, 15 students, and now we have yesterday a lecture with 170 students. This is how we have been growing. Beyond lectures, we also organized some online activities like open lectures. These ones were big events that then were followed up with a whole project led by the school and mentored by the scientists. These ones were on climate change, and they had like, it ran over three months during 2021, and this one is Science Congress that was held online. It was a planetary science congress for the Europlanet Science Congress that was run in 2020 and in 2021 fully online, and what we did was we opened the conference to schools by making the talks available, of course, with the permission of the scientists to the students, and also allowing them to have a Q&A with the scientists, and a sort of parallel talk. That's why this has this little blue arrow that shows that there were parallel talks that were on the same topic, but specifically targeted for kids, and trying to show them a bit why scientists go to conferences, what's the aim of it, why science communication is important, and what are the difference between doing an outreach talk and a scientific talk. However, and even though online activities are really cool, there's a lot of the impulse and interaction that is very important also for the kids to feel close to the scientists to use them as role models to have a bit of more this wonder of science. So in 2022, with the Europlanet Science Congress, what we did was combining both things. We did in-person activities in Granada because the event was held in Granada in 2022, and then we also moved this online for all the schools that were not in Granada. And this is how I'm here, because based on this experience, we thought of doing the same with the CSB Conf. Since Basen was attending this conference and he's my partner, so I was also coming, we thought maybe we could offer this to CSB, and of course they said yes. So we organized seven in-person lectures, four of them happened yesterday, there's two happening on Friday, and one that is actually happening next week, and the idea is we are going to local schools to interest the kids in data science if you want to talk to the people that gave them yesterday, Basen is one, but also there's just one that is right now giving another talk, who gave this talk, which was amazing, she even showed me a visualization of asking the kids if they were interested in data science before and after the talk and seeing the difference of why kids were not interested in data science, and they were saying things like, all I've heard about data science is bad things, like they collect data about you to then sell you advertisements or whatever. And precisely our idea with bringing the speakers of CSB to the schools was to show kids good use of data, and examples of what cool things one can do with it. I gave this talk because I needed to cover for someone that at the last minute cancelled, and this is something that we luckily don't have very often, but the problem is the school already blocked an hour and a half of their pay, and now we need to bring someone, so I did give this talk, and I talked of examples of all of you, and talking about the talks that were from the CSB, and the questions were all like, I had no idea that you could use data for this, because you know I'm studying social sciences, I have no knowledge of computers, why would data science be relevant for me? And so this is what we want to do, and ideally I would like afterwards to also organize sort of follow up activities with the same schools, so that it doesn't stop in just one lecture. If you would like to join, we actually have an opening for Friday. What we're doing is not actually a lecture, it's a speed meeting in which I would like to come, I would come also in person. For now there's three scientists, initially there were five, but due to visa problems. We are nothing, and the ideas the kids are going to have short 20 minute slots in which the scientists will only have to very briefly say in five minutes what they're working on, and then give the students time for questions, and then the groups are going to change. So we can bring as many scientists as we want, so whoever wants to join on Friday, it will be on Friday morning. Anyhow, I will just briefly tell you a bit more about our website. So in lectures we had boarders, I've been working with my very limited knowledge of programming, I did a little website, and what we're trying to do with this is creating a platform for schools and scientists to actually interact, because so far we have the problem that everything sort of goes through the core team, so all communications depend on us, and the idea is that we want both scientists to learn from teachers on how to like communicate these things to young audiences, and teachers also to learn from scientists, like it could be refining their classes, if they want to teach something they have someone that they can talk to and double check the facts before talking to the kids. Also we have a lot of information now on our website that before we were sending to the school directly or to the scientists directly, now you can see our code of conduct, you can see the child safeguarding policies and all our guides and like the guidelines for lectures and for schools. And our idea is that all these things that were before happening, organized sort of outside the website, now will be also published. When we organize workshops for scientists to maybe give tips to other scientists on how to present a specific topic, create communities of interest, give the feedbacks and all those things that we do, do them sort of in a more open way. All of our lectures that are recorded, which are not all of them, all the online ones are, but the in-person ones sometimes depend on the school, are all available on our YouTube channel. And if you want to know more, you can go right now to our website or text me or register or just, I don't know, talk to me right now. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much. This is amazing. We have time for questions. Does anyone have a question? I just wanted to do, if I can, I guess one quick statement. This is a great talk regardless of 24 hours. Thank you. I agree. I have only one question. If I understood correctly, so when scientists go to one place, they tell you they are going there, so you try to reach the community of that destination and a school? Yeah. I was wondering whether, I am sure you have an answer for this, but whether that could provide bias or wrong impression to that community that if you want to pursue a career in science, you have to go abroad, like the country where this scientist is coming from? Yes. And actually that is a very good point that I forgot to mention. That is one thing that I'm actively encouraging people to do is to give lectures in their own country. So the talk that is happening next week is actually by Laura, who is from Buenos Aires and is giving a talk in Buenos Aires. So there's two things that I try to always ask scientists. The first one is when I say going on holidays, it's like I gave talks in my own hometown because I want to tell people that you can do it. And still this sort of paradigm was the initial equation of lectures without borders. And it's something that I started, so I joined lectures without borders afterwards. I joined in 2020. And since I joined, I always ask people if they want to give a lecture in their own hometown, if they know anyone, bring more schools. Also because I found myself, especially when I went myself to my own school, that a lot of people are like, oh, so like, do you know other people that also went to France to do a PhD? And I'm like, no, but I know people that are doing PhDs here that are equally good. Especially so I'm a virologist, I did a PhD in virology. And it happened to me with a radio from my hometown that during the COVID pandemic, wanted someone to talk about that. And I said, I can give you a very, very good virologist that is also from my hometown, but is working in Argentina. Yeah, but you know, you work in France. And I was like, I worked with viruses. And now I don't anymore. I'm not really the person you want to talk to. You want to talk to someone that is actually researching this. And that's amazing people in Argentina doing this. So it's also like, try, I agree with you that we need to do this. And one of my aims for 2023 is to decentralize lecture cell borders. Because I find that because of how fast it grew, especially from 2020 until now. So when I joined in 2020, there were around 40 people in maybe 35 in our database, like scientists. And we had something like 100 schools. So all this growth was very, very fast. And we have almost no funding. So we are doing it like all of it as volunteers whenever we can. And I find that if we don't start decentralizing things, first of all, it cannot grow anymore. But also it will literally just collapse. Right now, I am overwhelmed with things. And I am almost 100% of the NGO right now. Because everyone else is working just like one hour, two hours, whatever. And that means that, so what I would like to do is basically have hubs in different countries. Basically just maybe one coordinator per country or two, whoever can volunteer a couple of hours, like whenever somebody's going to that country or wants to organize something, or a school in that country. Because for the webinars, for example, it's usually the schools that request the webinar on a topic. And if a school from a certain place requests something, we can contact the people from that country. So actually, it happened recently, a school from Nigeria asked for webinars on data science. And I contacted Jason there. And I told him, well, Basin contacted Jason actually. And we asked if they wanted to give something and because of the open bioinformatics foundation. And they said, actually, we can put you in contact with an Nigeria hub. And the scientists came in person. And for the kids, it was much better to see a person from Nigeria that does bioinformatics than having a white European giving talk about bioinformatics. So that is actually where my idea of having the local hubs started. I was like, this is actually much more valuable. And yeah, I'm trying to find a way if you have ideas. Also, if you have ideas for funding, this would be amazing. Because a lot of the things like we have this huge project that we are now piloting here in a school in Rosario. That is competition for women in STEM. We want to challenge kids to identify one woman in their community that is working in any STEM subject. Interview them and then prepare a little video. And then have competition on how the video should be telling us what this person is doing. So the kids have a bit of science communication and a bit of interviewing someone and also gives visibility to the women that are working in their own community. And it has them as role models. And it's a project that, one, they would like to do in like a global scale. But we need to start with one school because there's no way we can scale this without piloting it first. And then we will need to find money for it. So like this, we are trying to do small things. But yeah, whatever idea you have on how to decentralize this, it's right. I have a question, which is maybe unfair, based off what you just said about how you're already at max capacity. But you mentioned that you wanted a way to like follow up with the schools that you've talked to. Could you tell us more about that? Yes. So there's several ideas that we have. And we've been discussing this like the week before Easter. Because now we have like a board of members that we're creating that are like the members are the most engaged started like trying to help us precisely decentralize this. And one of the things that we came up with was a system by which like at the end of each lecture, the scientists could give an idea of like a small project that the teacher could do and basically co-create it with the teacher, like see how feasible it is. If I ask for example, I don't know, I'm a virologist and I want the kids to, I don't know, design something that they can do to identify something about viruses. And then like try to do like follow up or via email with the teacher to give them these instructions to the kids. And then the scientists would come once more something like two or three weeks after their initial intervention virtually to just mentor how this project is doing or maybe allow the kids to present the results to the scientists or something like this in which there's at least one small follow up so that it doesn't end in a came. I said something and then you forget about it tomorrow. Teachers, it was actually the idea came from the teacher because there's in the board members, there's scientists and there's also teachers. So it was, we're trying to see how to do it. I love this so much. Let's get you funding.