The OeAD Center for Citizen Science regularly invites Citizen Science and Young Science contact persons at universities, universities of applied sciences, teacher training colleges, and non-university institutions to network meetings. The aim is to exchange views on tasks and upcoming challenges relating to citizen science and science communication and to learn from each other.
As part of the 14th network meeting, the staff of the Public Science department at the OeAD presented two new initiatives.
Lydia Glaser gave an overview of the new competition “Young Science Days at Schools”. Schools and school classes from all over Austria are invited to organize Young Science Days at their schools and then document the events in small groups or as a class in a creative way and submit them to the OeAD. At the Young Science Congress 2025, the best and most creative contributions will be awarded cash prizes for the class fund.
Raphael Salzmann presented the information platform “Discover DNAustria”, which the OeAD recently took over from Graz University of Technology. The platform bundles offers for science and democracy education. The platform is currently under construction, with a focus on offers for schools in Vienna and Styria; in future, a wide range of offers from all Austrian federal states will be available.
This was followed by the results of the 2nd Sparkling Science 2.0 call, the calls for proposals for the Citizen Science Award 2025 and the Children's and Youth Universities 2025, as well as an overview of the development of the “Science Ambassadors” and “Pupils to Universities” initiatives.
At the end, the participating contact persons had the opportunity to suggest topics and ideas for a continuation of the training series for Young Science and Citizen Science contact persons in 2025.
Find the accompanying slides here. The event language was German.