Children and youth will gather on campus for a day to question, discover and create
About 300 children and teens are expected on campus Saturday (March 3) for a special event created by the highly successful McMaster Children and Youth University program.
The MCYU Curiosity Crawl will draw pupils from elementary and secondary schools from across the region, who will take part in a day featuring a menu of 15 one-hour sessions in total.
Each participant (most are between 7 and 14 years old) can take in as many as three sessions in such subject areas as how viruses spread, backyard biodiversity, what causes stress (and how to cope with it), how consumer goods are priced, and what smoking does to the lungs. All sessions will take place in the Burke Science Building.
MCYU launched in 2011, offering monthly no-cost, child-focused public lectures by McMaster faculty members, and since then has expanded to include other educational outreach events, such as MCYU In The City programs in priority neighbourhoods.
The broad aim of the program is to engage young people in university-style learning, in the hope of building knowledge for its own sake, previewing the kinds of learning available at university and showing participants that a university education is within their reach.
The Curiosity Crawl, which runs from 11 am to 3 pm, presents those ideas in a new, one-day event that features a free pizza lunch for all participants. Community groups are arranging transportation from priority neighborhoods to assure access for everyone.
Registration for the event has been brisk, the organizers report, and with the event already booked to near-capacity, they have been working to create some new spaces to meet demand.
“It’s exciting to be able to expand the ways that McMaster Children and Youth University connects to kids from all over Hamilton – and beyond,” says MCYU director Sandeep Raha, who is also an associate professor of Pediatrics at McMaster. “In just one day on campus, we’re able to expose young people to a broad variety of teaching and research that happens all across campus. We hope this will inspire them to see themselves doing the same kinds of things in the near future.”
