26/04/2024

'Olympic Girls' play and learn during a visit to IMPA.

A panel made with magic cubes and bearing the name of the “IMPA Olympic Girls” (MOI) program was the simplest and, at the same time, most significant activity that the students who are part of the project developed this Friday (26) during a visit to the institute. Letícia Rangel, coordinator of MOI, explains that the initiative aimed to highlight the importance of each girl in the program, which reached its Wednesdays edition this year.

“This year was a little different. Usually, the girls take a Rubik's Cube home, but this time, they brought this Rubik's Cube and arranged the cube's faces on the panel to form the name of the program and also of IMPA. The idea was to give concreteness to the sense of belonging. To say that they are this project,” explained Letícia.

The panel setup was one of dozens of activities that marked the beginning of the Wednesdays edition of the program. The inaugural MOI meeting featured a relaxed chat between the students and IMPA researchers Carolina Araujo and Luna Lomonaco, as well as workshops with fun and engaging games. The group, composed of 90 students from 12 public schools, was welcomed by the general director of IMPA, Marcelo Viana. "Now with more than ten schools, the project is bigger than ever in its mission to clearly state that women belong in science," said Viana.

Also welcoming the high school and middle school students was Emanuella Carneiro, a student of Mathematical and Earth Sciences at UFRJ, who was also a MOI student in 2022. Now, as an intern in the program, the undergraduate spoke about the importance of the project.

“My experience as a public school student was to feel the barriers to access to science that students in the public school system face. Sometimes we had difficulty getting a room at school for some activity. It's sad to see that science doesn't knock on the door in the same way in all schools, but MOI comes with this function of changing this reality, giving hope and popularizing science,” she said, excited about the start of the activities.

For the first time in the program, Yasmin Cordeiro, a 16-year-old student from the Sesi school in Jacarepaguá, has already described the project as surprising. “I had heard about MOI from a friend who participates in the program, but I didn't really know what to expect. This start has already exceeded my expectations, because I thought it would be something more technical, and arriving here, I saw that everything is very dynamic.”

Ana Luisa Moreira, 15, who is also a student at the Sesi school, says she received her first information about MOI from her mother, who is a teacher at the Cardeal Arcoverde school in Madureira. “My expectations are very high. I saw some talks by classmates who developed projects at their own school, and my mother already knew a little about it because her school already had MOI. I'm discovering everything here now.”

The program expanded in 2024.

The IMPA Girls' Olympic program has reached its Wednesdays edition, expanding the number of schools served. Last year, the program was present in 10 schools. This year, there are 12 participating institutions. It is expected that five more institutions will join the program starting in August. Currently, the MOI has 90 participants from different regions of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói.

The program offers scholarships for female students to dedicate themselves to the project's activities, which take place once a week at the schools themselves. The program also welcomes volunteer students, that is, boys and girls who are interested in the proposed activities but are not awarded scholarships. The initiative seeks to encourage the participation of girls between 14 and 17 years old in mathematics olympiads and in the field of exact sciences in general, with the aim of increasing female representation in areas such as mathematics, computer science, technology, and others.