Building robots, using 3D printers and testing chemical reactions is an excellent way to spend your Saturday. Nearly 400 11- to 14-year-old girls from Geneva and the surrounding regions participated in these and other entertaining and educational activities as part of the Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) initiative, last November. This was the third time that CERN participated in the biennial initiative and the second time that members of CMS where directly involved. EYH is an international programme that aims to draw the attention of young girls to the numerous careers available in the areas of science and technology. This is done through hands-on workshops where the girls interact with professional women who work in a variety of fields. This year, CERN and organizations such as EPFL, Thomson Reuters, Cisco, Google and Novartis participated, offering a total of 23 workshops. In addition to a career booth, CMS members were involved in three workshops. “Any cooler and you’ll freeze” enabled the girls to conduct different experiments with liquid nitrogen, culminating in the making of instant ice cream, an all-time audience favourite. They also built a cloud chamber and used it to observe cosmic rays in “Seeing the invisible”, while they constructed a particle accelerator in a salad bowl in “Round and round we go”. For the accelerator, the girls used regular salad bowls, conducting tape and cables along with Wimshurst machines to power them up, and made graphite-coated Styrofoam balls go round the bowls just as protons would in the LHC. At the end of the day, they got a taste of some of the concepts scientists use at CERN: cryogenics, particle detection and accelerator physics. Hopefully, some of them will one day join us in exploring the exciting world of fundamental research and make great discoveries for all of humankind! Photos from the event: See all