SBPC Goes to the School
MIND.Funga citizen science: children’s literature meets fungal taxonomy in the schools
Edital SBPC Vai à Escola 2020. Duration: 2020 até atualmente. Coordinator: Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler dos Santos.
Download FOR FREE the book version of your preference by clicking in it’s cover bellow.
The children’s book “Discovering the little things”, produced by MIND.Funga with the support of SBPC, FAPESC, CNPq, and CAPES is now available also in English, German and Spanish versions, in addition to the original Portuguese version.
Download the book versions through the links in the covers above.
The project:
We were selected by Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC) to participate in the action “SBPC Vai à Escola” (SBPC goes to the school). In this action we produced a children’s book (click on one of the book covers to download the ebook in your language of preference) that tells the story of a curious girl named Olivia who makes a great discovery: finds a fungus that turns ants into “zombies”. Olivia talks to her aunt, who takes her to a University to find a specialist, who says that she discovered a new species. The book is interactive: Olivia invites the reader to give the fungus a name, and the life cycle of this species is a quiz game, with each right answer advancing in the life cycle of the fungus and the ant.
The books will be distributed in schools of Urubici, Santa Cataria, and other municipalities around the São Joaquim National Park, providing supporting material for teachers to work on the topic of scientific nomenclature of newly discovered species. In addition, we are organizing a cultural contest with the students and the entire community to decide what will be the name of a new species of fungus that we encountered during our research expeditions in the Serra Catarinense.
Learn more about this new partnership between MIND.Funga / MICOLAB / UFSC and the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC) in the videos below:
