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Puli Space in education: promoting STEM skills for the newer generations

Team Puli Space not only aims to send a robot to the Moon, such a project also gives a unique opportunity to get science and engineering closer to the public. Promoting scientific thinking, offering educational opportunities and encouraging youngsters to choose a career in sciences is one of the main goals of the puli project. Because let’s face it, it does make you feel kind of awesome when you take your Moon rover prototype and go and show off in front of a large crowd of listeners. And besides feeling awesome, this can actually turn into an inspiring moment for whoever shows interest in the fancy machine. It even becomes possible to catch the attention of less enthusiastic pupils, and take this opportunity to give some information on the physics behind the robot, the maths of its way to the Moon, or the geography of the proposed landing site. This is especially important as the demand for STEM skills is steeply rising in the job market, and most of Europe is already experiencing a shortage of engineers and scientists. Csilla Orgel and Mars After about half a year of operation, Team Puli Space has already gathered a long list of educational events where it has participated (Researchers night, THE roadshow, Science Meetup, Futurology Meetup,Budapest New Tech Meetup, TEDx Budapest,TEDxYouth). Aiming for the Hungarian audience, we have given lectures to about 3-4000 listeners up to date. From these, according to our estimate, nearly 50% were high school students, soon to choose their individual career paths. Topics ranged from the Moon and Mars, space exploration, astronomy, to even less known areas like international space law. Apart from mere lectures the team has written educational articles for various Hungarian magazines, organized a drawing competition to reach even the youngest genarations, and also conducted public moongazing events with telescopes set up in the streets of Budapest. The overwhelmingly positive responses from the people in the street got even us surprised. People came up to get to see what’s happening, and ended up asking questions about the starry sky, honestly whishing the best of luck for the Puli rover, many even donating on the spot for such a cause. Márton Deák gives a talk on the history of spaceflight On top of these, we consider our greatest success in promoting science so far the event of the „Puli night„ in one of Hungary’s biggest shopping malls. The program filled evening conducted on the top of the Westend shopping mall in Budapest showed that people can even break out of a shopping spree and devote an evening instead to getting to know the solar system, the milestones of spaceflight and Hungary’s GLXP team. After only months of work the puli already seems to have succeeded in bringing science out to the streets and tried to show that everybody can take part in cutting edge science. You are welcomed to join our next public event which will be a set of talks on the topic of „environment and space” in Kecskemét, with the help of the city’s planetarium. Apart from this, Team Puli Space members are expected to pop up in various highschools throughout the country giving lectures on a weekly basis.
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