In Pasto, for 24 years, they have motivated students from various schools and universities to learn through play and thus discover new ways to acquire scientific and communicative knowledge.
Thus was born the Casa della Scienza e del Gioco, the largest classroom in the city, its 400 square meters make it a stage for motivation and learning. Cesar Vicente Benavides Torres, who is the coordinator of this space, recalled that about 30 years ago he looked at an article in a newspaper in La Coruña, Spain, where there was a house of play and science, and he thought, why don’t you have a place like this in Pasto?
“There was no such place in Colombia, until we found the Museum of Science and Games of the National University, an institution that at that time had presented a project to Colciencias to replicate this experience in intermediate cities,” said Vicente Benavides. .
This is how Pasto benefited from this project where 24 interactive modules and 8 information towers were installed. Today there are more than 100 models of interaction, managing over time to make citizens understand that the city could have a place where children and young people approach science.
“Topics such as physics, biology, robotics, areas related to environmental protection and the reduction of the impacts of climate change have been included, becoming a classroom where lessons are not taught, on the contrary, a methodology is used surprise, emotions and challenges that transform children into great researchers”, underlined the coordinator of the House of Science and the Game of Pasto.
The game, according to Vicente Benavides, is the champion that can be learned through recreation, a methodology that has been forgotten in school, especially in areas that are complicated for self-learning, and with this magical strategy recover this type of initiative.
“Where there is play, children and teenagers activate all their abilities, hence the importance of maintaining these spaces and enhancing them. Entering the House of Science and Play is another world, adults have arrived who remember when they were children and had known this place and are nostalgic”, indicated Cesar Benavides.
With what the students have been facing with the isolation due to the Covid 19 pandemic, there is a need to reinvent the way of teaching, because there are affectations in the mental part of the students and that is why teachers are looking for other ways to teach, get the students out of the four walls, lift them off their desks and remove their opinions from a blackboard and that they know other ways to learn.
This place, which serves students from kindergarten to university, routinely welcomes around 12,000 people, of which 70% are elementary school boys and girls.
