Ciênsação started in 2015, with the support of UNESCO Brasil, as an initiative to promote hands-on experiments at public schools in Brazil. Since then, volunteers have developed, tested, photographed and repeatedly revised more than 100 experiments. These experiments were then translated to Portuguese, Spanish and English, and published online, so that teachers in all of Latin America can benefit from this work.
If you know an experiment that fits the criteria of Ciênsação, and that you would like to share with your colleagues, you are cordially invited to submit it for publication at Ciênsação.
Like articles in scientific journals, submitted experiments undergo a peer-review process. After an editor approved the publication of an experiment, a photographer will take the pictures to illustrate it and the text will be translated into Portuguese, Spanish and English.
There are NO PUBLISHING FEES, and accepted experiments will be published as Open Education Resources, meaning that they are freely accessible for everyone. While publishing and use of the material are free, we expect all users of this site to respect the work of the volunteers who make this possible.
The term "Open Educational Resources (OER)" was coined at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and encompasses a wide range of resources that "reside in the public domain". Wikimedia, itself a great source of OER, describes them as "freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes." In practice, this means that you can use and adapt such materials for your teaching without worrying about copyright infringements.
All Ciênsação hands-on experiments – including text, photos and worksheets – are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. These contents are clearly marked with a Creative Commons licence logo (as depicted on the right) in the footer. You can use and adapt them as you see fit for your courses, e.g. include photos in your slides or worksheets. If you make changes to the material, we kindly ask you to clearly annotate this in the material before passing it on.
To cite an experiment, please add the following attribution, whenever an author name is given under the title of the experiment:
"By {Author Name}, www.ciensacao.org (cc-by-sa)"
Photos or experiments published by the Ciênsação core team do not refer to a specific author, so please attribute
"By Ciênsação, www.ciensacao.org (cc-by-sa)"
Please note: In order to protect the rights of students and teachers depicted in photos on the home page and the teacher information page, we need to exclude photos of persons or groups from the Creative Commons license on all pages without the Creative Common logo in the footer. These photos are not in the public domain, all rights are reserved.
Our Ciensação/Ciensación Facebook site serves as a forum for teachers to share their experiences. We also use it as a blog, e.g. to let the community know about new experiments.
Facebook has been criticized because it collects private data of visitors on any pages which include their 'Like' button. To ensure your privacy, the Ciênsação footer only includes a link to our Facebook site, but not a button with tracking code. If you would like to 'like' our page and tell your friends, we would be very happy. Please do this directly on Facebook.
We don't use cookies (we eat them).
We treat our visitors as we would like to be treated: welcoming and with respect. We are therefore not tracking you with cookies, nor do we collect any personally identifiable information (PII).
However, we do care about improving this site and therefore look into our server web logs. These logs record the requests your browser makes to our server, which still provide far more information about visitors than we want to know. For this reason we employ PIWIK, a software that automatically anonymizes visitor IPs and deletes old visitor logs.
The best way to contact us is by sending an
To pass our spam filter, please include "eureka" in the subject line. We are looking forward to hear from you!
Catalina Estrada [
@ 
] and Marta Reis [] are working with Ciênsação's international community, and provide the Spanish and Portuguese translations, respectively.
Claudia Kipka is Ciênsação's communication specialist.
Ciênsação has been created by Dr. Robert Fischer [
].