Children from the Aupatuz association visit the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics

• The students participated in two disseminative workshops given by PhD student Amaia Abanda and Postdoc Fellow Margarida Moragues

27 boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 13 who are part of the Aupatuz association visited the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics last Friday accompanied by Pedro Alegría and Raúl Ibañez from the Mathematics Department of the UPV/EHU.

Aupatuz is an association made up of families with children with high intellectual capacity with which BCAM collaborates in educational workshops. The aim of this collaboration is to provide these children with stimulating and challenging activities beyond the school environment, and to boost contact between them and bring them closer to science.

On this occasion, PhD student Amaia Abanda, from the centre's Machine Learning research line, and Margarida Moragues, postdoctoral researcher in the CFD area, were responsible for showing them the possibilities of a career in Mathematics.

During a workshop that lasted about an hour and a half, Amaia explained to a group of younger children what an algorithm is and how it is used to develop automatic learning techniques. She also taught them how to make a small hologram that they could reproduce using a smartphone. Margarida, on the other hand, carried out several experiments so that the older children could learn about the main properties of fluids and understand why the simulations they perform in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) group are very useful.