Children of different ages, teenagers and adults were at Unicamp on Saturday (26) for the first edition of the Open Doors Museums of Unicamp (MUPA). Unlike a common scene on weekends, when most of the University's buildings are closed, the event ended up giving a different tone to the campus, by allowing the external community to come for exhibitions, guided tours and workshops.
At the Exploratory Science Museum, one of the workshops held was on setting up herbaria and vertical gardens. “Few people know that a herbarium is a museum of plants, a collection,” said Lívia Cordi, curator of the herbarium at the Institute of Biology (IB). She explained that the idea of the activity was to show simple nature observation techniques for building the herbarium, stimulating the creativity of the participants, who were also invited to create arts with different types of dry leaves. Using reused materials, such as PET bottles, pots suitable for vertical gardens were assembled.
For Larissa Zucatti, ten years old, who came from Itu to participate in the workshop, the most interesting thing was learning about the types of leaves. Larissa's mother, Glaucia Zucatti, said that it was the first time her daughter came to Unicamp. Coming, according to Glaucia, has already enabled her to get an idea of what a university is like. “It was also very good for her to be able to choose a profession in the future. Now she knows how biologists can work, how a herbarium works,” she said.
MUPA also provided the opportunity for the academic community itself to experience the University in a different way, as in the case of the employee of the General Directorate of Administration (DGA) of Unicamp, Denis Alberto Scaqueti, who took advantage of the opportunity of the event to come to Unicamp outside of working hours . He and his wife, Cristiane, enrolled their six-year-old sons Lucas and João Paulo in three activities. While observing the two involved in the activities, they commented that the experience was very rich. “They interact a lot, discover new things and talk to their friends. Teamwork is also very good,” said André.
Integration outside and inside the University
Visits to the Zoology Museum and the laboratories of the Physics Institute also made up the MUPA program. Going through the various activities, student Vitor Amancio was one of the event's mediators, who helped ensure that everything ran smoothly. According to him, I MUPA was better than expected, and fulfilled the expectation of attracting the external community. “It brought integration, which is the role of the university: not only carrying out research within it, but showing this to the community”.
The integration between Unicamp's external and internal communities was also highlighted by the deputy coordinator of the Exploratory Science Museum, Paula Dornhofer Costa. For her, in this first edition, MUPA was able to give vent to a latent desire of Unicamp's various laboratories and museums to come together and open their doors on a different day. “It is an extraordinary result, with a very large public support. From MUPA we were able to discover possibilities. The first gain is for the population and the second is for ourselves, by being able to articulate ourselves better”.
Check out the I MUPA image gallery below.
