Using the Inquiry Cycle in a Science Club to integrate public school and university in the north coast of São Paulo state

Resumen

The Center for Marine Biology from the University of São Paulo promotes not only research and teaching but also outreach projects, highlighting a Science Club in partnership with a public school from São Sebastião town, which aims to approach the scientific knowledge construction process to middle school students. The activities in the Science Club are in agreement with the Schoolyard Ecology, a didactic-pedagogic propose that stimulates the natural curiosity to research and questioning about the environment. The methodological tool is the Inquiry Cycle, an alternative of the conventional scientific method aiming to answer a question from the nature observation by a personal action that collects data to be analyzed and discussed until it generates a new question. There was significant participation of students, teachers and technicians from both institutes. We have been still determining the best format along the last 4 years to make the activities more attractive and playful to the students. In spite of difficulty to maintain the amount of students until the end of the activities, the Science Club was a powerful agent to involve academic community in outreach projects and to engage teenager students from public schools in social-environmental discussions.