At PlusKids, learning always turns into an adventure for the little ones. So it was on Saturday, at Researchers' Night.
Together with the children we ran educational and entertaining activities: dry ice experiments, a hands-on conversation about the importance of vitamin C, painting on clay objects, programming robots, face painting and colourful balloons. A mix that looks eclectic but follows a logic: each workshop touches a different side of a child, so that in a single evening everyone finds at least one thing they are good at.
Dry ice remains, year after year, the star of the evening — smoke that sinks instead of rising is exactly the sort of sight that provokes the question "why", and that is where science begins. Programming robots works on the other side: there nothing spectacular happens until you give the instructions in the right order, and that kind of patience is hard to learn and useful everywhere afterwards.
Măgurele is a fitting place for an evening like this, and the children took part with an enthusiasm that confirmed once more that science does not need to be made simpler for them — it only needs to be shown in a way they can reach out and touch.