Support for Junior Uni online courses

Bayer Foundation will provide EUR 40,000 per year over the next three years to support digital learning by children and young people in the natural sciences through the “Wuppertal Junior University for the Bergisches Land region” – or Junior Uni for short. The program operates on a supra-regional level and will even continue once the COVID pandemic has ended.

Experimenting, researching and learning – this can also be done at home via laptop, as we’ve seen during the pandemic. In the Junior Uni’s digital courses, students meet with their lecturers through video conferencing and conduct research at home with the help of previously sent experimentation boxes. The online courses have attracted participants well beyond the Bergisches Land region and were met with a very positive response. Therefore, once the pandemic has ended, the Junior Uni would like to supplement the on-site courses that have now restarted, with a continued digital offering for children and young people all over Germany. And to facilitate this, Bayer Foundation is supporting the continuation of the Junior Uni’s online science courses with funding of EUR 40,000 per year for the next three years.

To mark the presentation of the donation, the Junior Uni team welcomed Dr. Karl Collins – Program Director for Science – and his colleagues from the Bayer Foundation with dry ice cocktails and of course an exciting experiment that offered a preview of the future online courses. Junior Uni Managing Director Dr. Ariane Staab is very pleased about the future support: “It’s tremendous that we can now maintain our online curriculum with the help of Bayer Foundation and thus supplement the on-site courses. In the future this will enable many children and young people, daycare centers and school classes to conduct chemistry experiments or gain initial experience in the area of medicine – not just in the Bergisches Land region, but throughout German-speaking Europe.”