Twelve Latin American universities are pleased to formally announce the launch of the EL BONGÓ physics project (E-Latin America Digital Hub for Open Growing Communities in Physics), an initiative funded by the Erasmus+ CBHE programme. The project will adopt an open, collaborative and multicultural approach to teaching. This builds on the LA CoNGA physics project, which was also funded by the EU and ran until the end of 2023.
The new teaching initiative is being extended to include Central American countries: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It also covers new areas of knowledge: High Energy Physics, Astroparticles and Multimessengers, Geophysics, Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Physics. One of EL BONGÓ Physics’ objectives is to strengthen communities in order to train people in these areas of work, incorporating cross-cutting components such as data science and instrumentation. The training programme involves designing modules that are validated by various master’s degrees from the participating Latin American universities, with the support of four European institutions. All the details of this project, which has just begun, are now available on the website:
https://elbongo.redclara.net/.
Colombia is the proponent of this new project and will coordinate it for the next three years. “With EL BONGÓ, we aim to establish a digital FABLab that connects resources, individuals, and opportunities, transcending geographical barriers and rendering science more accessible,” stated Gabriela Navarro, a researcher at Antonio Nariño University and the project’s primary coordinator.
Luis Núñez, a researcher at the Industrial University of Santander and co-director of EL BONGÓ physics, explained the emphasis on open science: ‘We want to generate the “FAIR principles” with all communities. That is, we want our digital content to be “findable”, accessible, interoperable and reusable. We want data resources and digital content to be available not only to our communities, but also to other researchers in Latin America.”
In its first phase, EL BONGÓ faces the challenge of convincing the Latin American research community with interests in the areas covered by the project to collaborate on a joint physics teaching proposal that reflects the new way of doing science.