2020 was the International Year of Sound, an area of high importance for science and technologies for all in modern society. Our team’s goal was to join the European Researchers’ Night event in Romania with this initiative, in order to emphasize both research activities and technological development mixed with sounds and music: DoReMi-RO. The intention was to promote and disseminate research results among young people during a one-day event – a welcome opportunity, though not sufficient. The idea was to spark kids’ curiosity, but it was also acknowledged that, the next day, they might feel that everything was beautifully solved in science and there was not much left to explore. In such cases, research as a career might seem unattractive.
Therefore, after a single successful evening such as the Night, the event was meant to be transformed into a new public challenge, based on the well-known concept of collaborative engagement. The general objective of the project was to raise awareness about research results supported by experiments, by involving participants in a citizen science initiative where researchers and the public would work together. This collaborative process was planned to take place before, during, and after the Night event, with the aim of creating a magnetic map of Romania.
Everyone was expected to use common smartphones to measure the magnetic field throughout Romania. The anonymously gathered data, along with GPS coordinates, was supposed to be uploaded to an internet-based platform. The DoReMi-RO event was envisioned to be held in more than 15 cities across Romania, among which: Baia Mare, Brașov, Bucharest, Cluj, Constanța, Craiova, Iași, Pitești, Timișoara, Sibiu, and Suceava. The proposed activities were meant to consist of various minds-on and open-air sessions – hands-on experiments, debates about collaborative engagement models, games, and quizzes – organized in an entertaining and stimulating way by real researchers.
The project ran between 2020 and 2021.