About PADAWANS
The PADAWANS long-term project aims at introducing to young children, from all walks of life, a multitude of professions and profiles in the space sector by inviting them to share hands-on experiences with SGAC members in their classrooms. Thanks to this pool of students and young professionals invited in their classrooms, as well as the support of the teachers, children will be able to project both their current interests and themselves onto the space sector. In addition, as parents play a key role in the education of their children, they are also invited to participate in these activities.
Concretely, the PADAWANS team is working on several activities which can be separated into the following objectives:
- Supporting the organization of outreach events in schools by encouraging and providing any SGAC members the tools and means they would need to go into the classrooms as speakers. Onboarding SGAC speakers would be able to rely on the team’s activities to prepare the event in terms of programmes and activities, to be able to talk to previous SGAC speakers in order to get some lessons learnt and to be taught, if willing to, about gender diversity and equality facts to share with children. The team would also ensure that key objectives are respected and that all SGAC regions benefit from outreach workshops.
- Creating and providing educational resources to be used in schools and hands-on activities that promote gender equality and diversity in the space sector. The activities should be accessible in as many languages and cultures as possible and should also be easily reproducible. Educational resources aim at targeting both children, their parents and teachers, meaning that different types of resources are created and made available based on the target audience. For instance, at the moment, an educational book for parents has been created presenting jobs in the aerospace industry, whereas the educational book for children is composed of games and activities.
- Communicating and partnering. This first ensures communication about PADAWANS activities both internally, to invite as many SGAC members as possible to be our speaker in schools; and externally via the participation in conferences and releases of our advancements online. Then, the team is also in charge of managing partnerships that would aim at enhancing the work we are doing (with organisations that would share similar objectives and activities) and to help in raising fundings through bursaries and collaborations.
