Section: Dissemination
Popularization
Zenith has major contributions to science popularization, as follows.
Code Teaching for Kids
Teaching code is now officially in the school programs in France. Class'Code is a PIA project that aims at training the needed 300,000 teachers and professionals of education France. The project is a hybrid MOOC (both online courses and physical meetings). Florent Masseglia is co-author of the first course and scientific referent of the other courses.
Along with Class'Code, the association “La main à la pâte” has coordinated the writing of a school book on the teaching of computer science teaching, with Inria (Gilles Dowek, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Florent Masseglia and Didier Roy), France-IOI and the University of Lorraine. The book has been requested by and distributed to 15,000 readers in less than one month. The extension of this book for the French "Collège" has been released this year with new activities and new scientific content.
F. Masseglia is giving a doctoral training at different doctoral schools in Montpellier, in order to train facilitators for helping teachers and people of the education world to better understand the "computational thinking". So far, 14 people have been trained. He is also a member of the management board of "Les Petits Débrouillards" in Languedoc-Roussillon and the scientific responsible for school visits in the LIRMM laboratory.
F. Masseglia is member of the pedagogic committee of "Edu'up", a project from France-IOI on learning code and computational thinking.
Science Outreach
In the context of the Floris'tic project, A. Joly participates regularly to the set up of popularization, educational and citizen science actions in France (with schools, cities, parks, etc.). The softwares developed within the project (Pl@ntNet, Smart’Flore and ThePlantGame) are used in a growing number of formal educational programs and informal educational actions of individual teachers. For instance, Smart’Flore is used by the French National Education in a program for reducing early school leaving. Pl@ntNet app is used in the Reunion island in an educational action called Vegetal riddle organized by the Center for cooperation at school. It is also used in a large-scale program in the Czech republic (with an objective of 40 classrooms in the end). An impact study of the Pl@ntNet application did show that of the respondents use it for educational purposes in the context of their professional activity.
Events
Zenith participated to the following events:
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F. Masseglia co-organized and co-animated the Inria's stand at “La fête de la science”, Montpellier, held by Genopolys (a science village).
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F. Masseglia co-organized the regional Code-Week events with the local network of media-library ("réseau des médiathèques de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole").
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F. Masseglia is member of the project selection committee for “La fête de la science” in Montpellier.
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A. Joly designed/animated several stands and public demos in events: “La fête de la science” (Montpellier, 1 day demo), 50 ans de l’Inria (Paris, 2-days demo), Expomobile Homonumericus (Itinerant expo in France).