Students 4 Students 2015

Posted on 20/12/201523/07/2016 by YM Webmaster

One of the main goals of EPS Young Minds project is to connect young scientists among different physics fields, and therefore we decided to organize students’ colloquiums, where young scientists from our university presented their research activities.

Colloquiums, which was named Physics Pizza Party according to offered refreshments, were held regularly every second week, on Wednesday afternoon, from 5 P.M. Totally, we organized five colloquiums, where different physics fields, namely experimental nuclear and particle physics, applied mathematical modelling, nuclear engineering and thermonuclear fusion, were presented by Ph.D. and master students. For majority of invited speakers, it was their first experience to present their research activities in front of the the audience, which was not familiar with the topic. Despite of this fact, each talk was perfectly prepared, and therefore there was no problem to understand given topic. These events were scheduled for 30-45 minutes, but due to participants’ interest and their questions, in the end the colloquiums took more time – around 2 hours. According to the speakers it was very rewarding experience for them.

These events were advertised in form of posters, which were placed in school buildings. For the purpose of inviting as many participants as possible, we also advertised it on our social sites, namely Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to this advertisement, our students’ colloquiums were most visited. Average number of participants was around 20 students per one colloquium. The presented topics were so interesting, that besides the students from our faculty, the colloquiums were also attended by the students from different university.

The Prague EPS Young Minds Section found these colloquiums rewarding, since this style of presentation “students for students” is still very rare in our country and we were one of the first, who organized this style of colloquiums. According to the feedback from our participants, we concluded, that our colloquiums were successful, since they were very positively rated by participants. Thanks to these positive feedback and high number of participants, we would like to continue with this activity.

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Posters

Posted on 20/12/201520/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

Prague section of EPS Young Minds project is the first one in the Czech Republic. It is not connected with any other group or local project. That is why it is needed, that as many people as possible recognize it and are informed about our goals and activities.

In these days, there many possibilities to promote activities and we try to exploit all of them. We would like to make good image to the name of “Young Minds”, so that every student is familiar with our main goals and style of our activities. That is why we decided to also prepare big posters, badges and business cards that were distributed to all people visiting our events, or to those, that could be future participants in our events.

Badges are very popular promotional object in these days. You can just pin them to your bag or jacket, and then everybody who see it knows, that you are interested in promoted activity. Layout of our Young Minds badge is simple – we just redesigned Young Minds logo. By having it on these badges, YM logo is being more and more known. Some people are asking about this logo, and consequently about the Young Minds project itself. We produced 50 badges, every YM member is obliged to have it on and we also distributed it in our events.

Lot of young students are not used to write down email addresses or another contact, they just hope to remember it. That is one of reasons why we designed business cards with information about our section. These are also more useful for face-to-face discussions about our activities. First bunch containing 40 low quality business card was distributed in one week that is why we decided to redesign them to be as attractive as possible and to print them in better quality. Fifty of them was produced, and we are distributing them every time it is needed.

These two mentioned manners are kind of active advertising, but we also produced the passive one. It is a big poster that is situated in hall of our faculty. It contains basic information about the goals not only of the Young Minds project, but also the EPS and the Czech Union of Mathematicians and Physicists. Our plan is to produce another type with short opinions of our members about becoming an active member of YM.
These object helped us with spreading idea of Young Minds.

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Science Conspiracy Mythbusters 2015

Posted on 01/12/201523/07/2016 by YM Webmaster

The principal motivation for Mythbusters project was to demonstrate that lots of widely spread information based on interpretation of various physical phenomena and technological advances
are misguiding and in many cases not even completely true.
But since most of these claims exploit the scientific terminology while using purely non-scientific methods, it may seem trustworthy. This confusion might lead to lowering the trust of scientific
work accuracy and moreover induce the panic among the general public.

In order to dispel these fears we prepared an informal seminar to discuss one of the popular video about the so-called connection between the research conducted at the Large Hadron Collider in
CERN and its consequences on increasing number of recent natural disasters, such as infamous earthquake in Nepal. The reason behind choosing topic of research in CERN is due to the fact,
that many of us do their study there.

During the seminar this particular video was screened, accompanied by our presentation about mentioned misused physical phenomena together with their correct explanation. For that reason,
we also prepared the subtitles both in Czech and English.

This event turned out to be quite popular among the audience, consisting mostly of young students of our faculty. It took place during the “Faculty Open Night” (November 2, 2015), an evening
where research done at our institution is presented among students and general public. We decided to repeat this screening three times during the evening due to the huge demand.

During each presentation, the conference room was fully occupied. In total, there was 75 participants which exceeded our initial expectations. According to the feed-back, students enjoyed
such activity and lots of them expressed the interest in similar screening. We are considering organising another screening focused on different topic.

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