In order to raise public awareness about the EU Researchers’ Night initiative, promote their participation in the main event on 30th September 2022 and offer them different ways to meet and interact with the researchers, the project partners organised several pre-events in different contexts and with different degrees of involvement during 2022.
As for the co-building the virtual Aranda R/V, HOLO3 recreated the 3D modelling of the virtual Aranda R/V, a short teaser presenting the work made to model the digital twin and the free visit experience, the integration of a virtual Aranda R/V free tour on Android tablets/smartphones to allow user to freely navigate around the virtual R/V, a free tour integrated on web browsers and then for virtual reality headsets, production of the first point of interest (POI) to guide the users through the experience.
BlueNIGHTs organised EU Researchers’ Night events in 13 cities representing the main EU Regional Sea Areas (RSAs):
- Tulcea/Galati for the Black RSA;
- Venice/Trieste/Naples and Valletta for the Mediterranean RSA;
- Torreira-Murtosa/Lisbon/Horta for the Atlantic RSA;
- Boulogne-sur-Mer for the English Channel/North RSA;
- Helsinki for the Baltic RSA.
Activities were also organised in Strasbourg and Bologna as inland location.
All the BlueNIGHTs were also connected via a dedicated online platform, so participants could ‘visit’ the other nights (
https://bluenights.vfairs.com/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) and see activities proposed in all six countries (see Deliverable D3.1 for details).
During the first year of the project, 32 researchers belonging to the partner Consortium made available 46 meetings for the schools most of them onsite. The interactions were mostly based on seminars, workshops and hands-on activities. Several topics were requested by or offered to the schools among which 11 % online and 89% onsite. 30 schools (19 high, 10 middle, 1 primary) were involved, with some more pupils participating not directly by their schools and some teachers trained in specific meetings with researchers. 10 schools were located in Italy, 2 in Portugal, 11 in Finland, 7 in Malta. About 60 classes were involved, for a total of about 1550 pupils together with about 80 teachers. A total of about 1250 pupils were involved in other type of pre-events such as beach clean-up, guided tour, experiments, etc. by 29 researchers (see Deliverable D4.1 for details).
The impact evaluations collected through the questionnaires were used both within the project and to compare it with projects of a similar nature in order to improve its activities and increase its effectiveness. Four questionnaires were used: pre-events (WP1); schools (WP4); Night (WP3); researchers. The texts of the questionnaires were translated into 6 languages: English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian and Finnish, to make them more easily administered in different local contexts.
