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Learning science during summer vacations and its effects on attitude and anxiety towards research

The outbreak of COVID-19 had a great impact on education with the sudden shift from traditional to online learning. As a result, the difficulties experienced by students increased, professors had to adapt the teaching method of the contents and experimental activities were all transmitted from a screen, making this a difficult task for everyone. In this context, the resumption of in-person activities is of great importance to surpass the difficulties that this pandemic crisis has brought to students learning. Motivated by this necessity, the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), proposed a program called “Summer with Science”. This program aimed to develop presential activities with the participation of students, professors, and researchers in the summer of 2020, that involved innovative solutions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. i9Masks was one of the interesting projects that emerged from this initiative and it consisted of developing transparent facial masks for preventing the virus’ dissemination. This project joined students of different engineering and biological sciences at any level in a Higher Education Institution to learn science. In order to understand the impact of this course on student’s motivation to conduct research, in the present study, a questionnaire was used to collect the data from the students who participated in the i9Masks summer project. The same questionnaire was applied to non-participants as a control group. After the data are gathered, the results were evaluated, and it was observed that effectively this course had a great and positive impact on student’s perspective on research activities. Significant differences were observed regarding the attitudes towards research between participants and non-participants. © 2021 University of Minho. All rights reserved.