Participation in Campus Ítaca grows in this new edition, starting on 25 June
Campus Ítaca, the socio-educational programme of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for secondary school students, will once again be held in two shifts: from 25 June to 3 July, and from 7 to 15 July.
Campus Ítaca grows each year with every new edition. This year, a total of 324 third-year secondary school students from 67 schools in 15 different towns of the Vallès Occidental region will be participating in a series of educational and recreational activities that aim to encourage them to continue their studies once they have completed their compulsory education. These 15 and 16-year-old students have good study skills, but complex socioeconomic situations and, many times, no close relatives that have graduated from university.
The main goal of the Campus Ítaca is to contribute to a reduction in school abandonment and be a space of knowledge, learning, and leisure for participants in order to enhance their academic motivation and self-efficacy as students.
Participants can choose from different activities, both in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) area, as well as in social sciences and the humanities. This year, 62 UAB lecturers and 19 instructors will also participate.
In this edition, students will have two new cases to solve: “When diversity adds: different capacities, shared opportunities” and “Operation BB84 – quantum code”, as well as the project “Detectives from the Past: Forensic Anthropology Campus”. Participants will also learn to produce a television programme, the steps needed to create a political party, organise a trip to Mars, and they will also discover the field of neuroscience thanks to a series of lab activities.
Campus Ítaca first began in 2004, when at that time rector of the UAB Lluís Ferrer i Caubet visited Scotland and discovered the Summer Academy project at the University of Strathclyde. Upon returning to the UAB, he decided to implement a similar project to help fight school abandonment and invite secondary school students to discover the University. From then on, this project was organised between 2004 and 2014 by the Institute of Education Studies and, since 2015, has been managed and organised by the UAB’s Fundació Autònoma Solidària.