paper

"Niñas Atómicas" (Atomic Girls): An initiative that generates opportunities for young girls in STEM

arXiv:2511.05754 · doi:10.1088/1361-6552/ae65fa

Abstract

We report on an initiative that seeks to encourage high school girls to develop critical thinking and transferable skills widely used in scientific work, as well as to generate a concrete space of opportunities for girls to experience how real science is done. Our "Niñas Atómicas" workshop combines the teaching of particle physics, electronics, programming and scientific methodology through building and operating a dedicated experiment: a muon counter. Girls from all over Chile can apply to this workshop, where every year they are guided by female scientists for two weeks. We report on the contents and methodology of our workshop and provide details on how to build the muon detector. We report results on muon flux and proper lifetime, two muon properties which can be extracted from the data collected by the girls with the muon detectors they built themselves. Insights into the girl's experiences during the 2024 and 2025 editions of the workshop are also detailed, with the aim to contribute to the wider physics education research and outreach communities.

arXiv comment10 pages, 9 figures. In v2, updated figures, text and references. v3 matches published version in Giovanna Cottin and Francisca Garay 2026 Phys. Educ. 61 035051, DOI 10.1088/1361-6552/ae65fa. Conclusions unchanged. Associated files can be found at https://github.com/gfcottin/Atomicas

References in corpus (8)