Our project runs in 4 work packages: awareness raising, the NIGHT event itself, impact assessment and management. We started the activity in mid spring 2021, the project peaked in the last weekend of September, the impact assessment and evaluation took place over the fall and reporting were done in winter 2022. A central element is the involvement of schools. In the first work package we created awareness of the NIGHT itself and we prepared the installations, workshops, prototypes and other activities that were to be presented on the final NIGHT weekend. In the first part of the project, we made agreements and arrangements with the schools and their teachers on how they could work in a student driven and participatory manner with the aim of illustrating challenges where research and science could make a contribution. We brought in mentors from knowledge intensive businesses as well as early career researchers and MSCA researchers to assist and work as mentors at the schools. The transversal overall theme was the challenges for the food, agricultural and natural eco-system. The final event in the last weekend of September was split in two: on Friday we had presentations at the schools and on Saturday at the central venue. Our impact assessment aimed to get an understanding of whether our central NIGHT objectives were reached and we used pupils, teachers and visitors at the final event as informants. We learned that visitors were quite positive and found the choice of thematic topic relevant. They also liked very much the idea of involving young people from school to communicate science. In particular we find found a supportive attitude among parents that were the primary visitors at the Friday school events. For the teachers part we learned that teachers are very supportive to the idea of education for sustainability and they are also very open to the idea of prioritizing the STEM subjects and some of them were also positive to the idea of working in a Project Based Learning manner. For the pupils we learned that there was high support to the idea of working independently and in a bottom up manner where the needs of the students in terms of science and research became important. They also like the idea of bringing in mentors from both business and from research to develop the different instruments to be presented at the final NIGHT. For the limitations we learned in particular that it is extremely important to start early working with the schools because schools are using a very long planning horizon we also experienced that the schools preferred smooth and well planned instructions on how to work with pupils and how to prepare the things to be presented at the final night. Overall we learned that theme can easily be expanded to cover all other important topics such as natural resource, resource boundaries land-use boundaries, biodiversity, soil health, climate mitigation, energy and water efficiency were perceived as timely and relevant topics to bring into the SESAM project. All in all we conclude that communicating the role of research and science in a school setting and using young people as the point of departure has huge potentials.
