The Researchers’ Night is an all-European event, which takes place since 2005 on the fourth Friday in September. Scientific and research organizations, museums, laboratories and academic institutions organize different events with which to offer the general audience and in particular to the young the possibility to meet researchers and to get acknowledged with research activities.
In the framework of The Researchers’ Night, the Slovene Research Institute SLORI organizes research workshops that are part of the long-term and already consolidated collaboration of the institute with schools. The workshops are dedicated to pupils and students of secondary schools. In the workshops, students of two Slovenian higher secondary schools in Trieste and Gorizia already collaborated, as well as pupils from lower secondary schools from San Pietro al Natisone, Doberdò, Opicina, Gorizia, San Giovanni and Cattinara.
The aim of these workshops is to promote research activities among young generations and is based on real research experiences. Pupils and students carry out a shorter research duty and in the workshops they get acquainted with methods of empirical research, which, in our case, are questionnaire-based. Workshops take place daily at the beginning of the school-year, during morning hours. For higher secondary school students, workshops last two weeks, for lower secondary school pupils they last one week. One of the main characteristics of these research workshops is team work, through which the research project develops. Research workshops end with the presentation of the results at the schools and with the evaluation of the work performed.
The content of the research duty is usually referred to a topical social theme touching the teenage generation. Higher school students deal with more demanding contents like use and abuse of the digital technology, the phenomenon of paedophilia, violence at school, inclusion in social media, intercultural values, cross-border connections and similar, while lower school pupils deal with more accessible topics like living in the school environment, spending spare time, hobbies and videogames choice, use of technological instruments, acknowledgement of current migration streams and similar.
In 2012, pupils of the last year of the lower secondary school from Opicina analysed the nutrition habits of their fellows. The theme was linked to the first edition of TRIESTE NEXT, the European Forum of Innovation and Scientific Research, organized by the Municipality of Trieste on the occasion of the European Researchers’ Night. The title of the first edition of TRIESTE NEXT was Save the food, and SLORI collaborated with the research work of these pupils. They presented their work with the title Eat healthily, live healthily to pupils of Slovenian and Italian lower secondary schools.
The following year, a group of students from Gorizia carried out a questionnaire-based research on Water for everybody, everybody for water and presented it in the tent in Piazza Unità in the framework of Trieste’s edition of The Researchers’ Night 2013. The theme was linked to the topic of the second edition of TRIESTE NEXT, which took place during the same weekend under the title WaterWise.
In the tenth edition of the workshops, the research group was formed by pupils of the third year of the lower secondary schools “Ivan Cankar” from San Giacomo and “Sv. Ciril in Metod” from Cattinara. The research We are the world dealt with the theme of current migration streams, which was nicely connected to the title of the fourth edition of TRIESTE NEXT BIOlogos – The Future of Life. The young researchers presented the results of their works to fellows of Slovenian and Italian lower secondary schools in the Auditorium of the Revoltella Museum in Trieste.
The workshops are conducted by researcher Norina Bogatec.