News

CAPE participated in Noorderlichten 2019

The CAPE team was actively involved in Noorderlichten, an event at Noorderzon organized by the Young Academy Groningen (YAG) to bring scientific research outside academia and give children and other non-scientists the opportunity to experience what it is like to do research.

Tina Kretschmer was involved in organizing Noorderlichten as a member of the YAG and Nynke Douma as one of the student-assistants of the YAG. Charlotte Vrijen organized the Noorderlichten activity ‘Like parent like child?’, together with two researchers from the University Medical Center Groningen, Jennifer Klop-Richards and Anoek Sluiter-Oerlemans. During the ‘Like parent, like child’ activity, children and their parents were invited to investigate for themselves how similar they were in looks, physics, character and emotions. With different instruments they compared their hair color, freckles, their ability to roll up their tong, but also characteristics like being a morning or evening person, and starting tasks right away or delaying them. Finally, their emotional responses were compared during a sometimes very frustrating giant Bibberspiral. We used posters to explain the assignments and give background information to the children and their parents, for example about the role of genes and parenting in explaining why some children show great similarity to their parents while others do not. All posters can be downloaded from OSF: https://osf.io/6f59z/ .

Links and additional information

The local newspaper ‘Dagblad van het Noorden’ followed a 7-year-old participant and her father during their quest for similarities.