Abstract:

For the Museum of Natural History Alfredo Dugès of the University of Guanajuato, it is important to contribute to reinforce the knowledge of natural sciences taught in the elemental and high school programs looking to increase the understanding and public valuation of the scientific and technological advances, to offer experiences that stimulate the scientific activities, open spaces to reflect that allow to realize experiences and reinforce the knowledge of sciences. With this idea, the museum proposed to offer open lectures that we called Monday of Science. The goal of that event is to approach people to science, especially young students, through conferences offered by academics and researchers of different Universities and Investigation Institutes, about different topics from science, and with an interdisciplinary approach. The first stage started in August of 2005, during five months. In that period we offered thirteen lectures with subjects as the origin of the universe, cloning, microorganisms, cells, and other. A great number of high school students attended those conferences, who came interested in the content of the lectures. We must to mention that the researchers exposed the different topics in their conferences in a very clear way, accessible to all kind of public, so the result of this experience was very enriching for all of us, as far as the public requested to have a new cycle of conferences. We decided then to offer new lectures form February to May 2006 were we had the same success than the first time. In the first semester of 2010, we presented the 9th cycle of conferences and we recently publish the first printed memory that includes the full lectures of the two first cycles. We used to receive and average of 200 students from high school, mainly from the capital of the state, but also from different communities in Guanajuato. Nevertheless, is expensive to those last ones to come to the capital to attend the lectures, so we propose to take advance of the new technologies to raise young people interested in science. Multimedia contents allow reinforcing the education-learning process, transfers information, and let the user to explore and to experiment, since their visual resources are dynamic and innovating. The other reason to apply new technologies to this project is that actually the open learning and the distance learning has become an innovation where the space-time-distance between teacher and student does not exist as traditionally used. And is why we propose the using of alternative mass media products, as the use of cell phones and podcast as elements that support the profit of our goals, considering than in Mexico their use among students had become a tool that allows communicating in a synchronic and interactive way, supported by images and complete contents.

Keywords:

natural sciences, multimedia.