I got to know Citilab by the end of 2007. In 2008 I presented my first proposal of a project there, and since then I haven’t stopped collaborating with the Citilab team.

My first suggestion was the creation of a workshop, Tecnolab, addressed to children from ages 7 to 9. It is focused on letting children discover the concepts of digital technology, but almost without ever touching a computer. In Tecnolab children discover what a pixel is, what a computer program is, what a virus is, what does codification do (going back to the Romans an their cipher cylinders) ,why it is interesting to encrypt messages, what the Internet is and how to create content online such as writing blogs and knowing how to do a presentation online. And most of this is done with paper, pencils, crayons, and scissors and with a lot of fun and games. Tecnolab takes the structure of a weekly after-school activity.

Later, Citilab offered me the opportunity to create short one-day workshops, and I also acted as a consultant on the creation of new activities such as the InventaTV media discovery activity for children.  I also cooperate with Citilab in the creation of new outreach and science and technology communication strategies for schools and universities.

Currently, I keep working with the educational area of Citilab Cornella, and I am developing a new innovative and interactive exhibition project called Expolab.

In 2008 I started collaborating with the company Invenio Learning by Doing. They are the main distributors of LEGO Education Center in Spain and they also exploit several other educational technology products that originated at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. They are also very active in creating materials to promote Science and Technology education among primary and secondary schools.

My first work for them was the creation of worksheets explaining concepts of educational science and technology for elementary school students. These worksheets are meant as a support teaching material for teachers in schools and they incude concepts and activities that should be done just with the material at hand at the classroom. So they need to be able to explain important concepts and principles on how several technologies work with very simple materials. The topics of the worksheets covered from “What is a virus”,  to “what are genetically engineered foods” or “what are LEDs and how they work”. All in all. more than 30 concepts that worked.

After these worksheets I also created the contents and script for a workshop addressed to primary education teachers. This time, the challenge was to give knowledge to teachers about technology to so that they would be able to design and implement their own activities to make technology understood to children.

I also collaborate Invenio, advising them on various workshops and summer activities, among other things.

During 2008 I was in charge of the science communication for the Software Department (LSI) at  the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).

This period saw my immersion in the world of digital technology. I created the whole strategy of communication for the Department which previously had had none. The main goals for the Departament were to make understood their research and its quality, to address companies that could be interested in this research and to approach prospective PhD and Master students.

I worked hard to give a personal and close view of the day to day effort and tasks of the research that is carried by professors an PhD students in the Department. It was a challenge since most of the research in computer science is very abstract and for the general public is difficult to see the merit of it as well as the relevance to their day to day life or the business importance of it. However, I discovered that the research that was done at the department was indeed very relevant and useful for very different areas of life, from sustainability to health, from economics to human psychology. This is what gave me the clue to the contents of the newsletter and what helped me define the strategy of science communication. It was important to put the researcher at the center of the communication, to show them as human beings and to make evident that their work was interesting, challenging, and fun.

In order to fulfil these goals I devised a strategy based on several channels and activities. The most important was the design of the department monthly newsletter, +LSI, which revolved around interviews with researchers about their current research and with alumni that were successful as researchers or as digital entrepreneurs. The Newsletter reached an important impact and was distributed internationally to a network of researchers and companies.

Other activities included the creation of materials for students at several fora, as well as articles on the UPC magazine Informacions. I also organized an international workshop on the future of the Quality University Education in Informatics that gathered the most relevant professionals in the area in Europe and had important impact given the current discussion on the role of computing in the new curricula in Spain and Europe.

It was while working at the Department that I got to know the team of Mossega La Poma, a blog and a podcast which are very successful among Apple users. I started cooperating then with them. A collaboration and friendship that lasts to these days. 

For two years I was a member of the team in the Educational Area of CosmoCaixa (formerly known as Barcelona Science Museum, an institution that is part of the Social Programme of Foundation "la Caixa",  part of the largest savings bank in Spain).

This was a time full of learning, of getting good training in various disciplines of science and education, outreach and expression techniques, culminating in the creation and execution of a large number of workshops, tours, clue guessing games, planetarium programs,  training of instructors, volunteers and teachers, etc..

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Currently I am still working with CosmoCaixa, as an external consultant. I workon the creation of new educational materials in Catalan, Spanish and English. I re-designed CosmoCaixa itineraries and adapted to the permanent collection of the Museum, I have created new sets of clue guessing games and new workshops, and I contributed to the training of monitors of the “La Vola”, the company that currently provides the monitor service. among other clients, to CosmoCaixa.

The last commission I received from CosmoCaixa and with which we are still working, is the creation and execution of three workshops related to technology, on the occasion of the celebration of Santa Eulalia Day, an important day in Barcelona when the museum opens up with a lot of activities..

For a year, I developed the tasks of physics technician at the Rathmore Grammar School.

These were very interesting months. I was in charge of four school laboratories and lived surrounded by measuring instruments, prisms, generators, plasma balls and several experiment sets. I worked under the direction of Professor Helen Quinn and was adviced by Professor Jim Woods.

My stay at Rathmore Grammar School was not confined to the world of Physics. I also collaborate with the department of Spanish language where I taught and started jazz dance classes. I  also participated in tasks at the library center, directed by Susan Byrne, and I integrated myself fully in the day to day of school.

Living for over a year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was quite an experience!