Engaging Scientific Diasporas in STEAM Education: The Case of Science Clubs Colombia.

Currently, there is limited insight on the role that scientific diasporas can play in STEAM education in Latin America. Here, we present the Science Clubs Colombia (Clubes de Ciencia Colombia-SCC) program, a pioneering STEAM capacity-building initiative led by volunteer scientists to engage youth and children from underserved communities in science. The program brings together researchers based in Colombia and abroad to lead intensive project-based learning workshops for young students in urban and rural areas. These projects focus on channeling the students' technical and cognitive scientific aptitudes to tackle challenges of both local and global relevance. The program provides high-quality STEAM education adapted to communities' needs and articulates long-lasting international collaborations using the mobility of the Colombian diaspora. The program's success is tangible via its sustained growth and adaptability. Since its first version in 2015, 722 volunteer scientists living abroad or in Colombia have collaborated to create 364 clubs with the participation of 9,295 students. We describe elements of the SCC program that lead to a scalable and reproducible outcome to engage science diasporas in STEAM education. Additionally, we discuss the involvement of multiple stakeholders and the generation of international networks as potential science diplomacy outcomes. The SCC program strengthens the involvement of Latin American youth in science, demonstrates the potential of engaging scientific diasporas in science education, and enriches connections between the Global South and the Global North.

FOXSI-2 Solar Microflares. II. Hard X-ray Imaging Spectroscopy and Flare Energetics.

We study the nature of energy release and transfer for two sub-A class solar microflares observed during the second Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI-2) sounding rocket flight on 2014 December 11. FOXSI is the first solar-dedicated instrument to utilize focusing optics to image the Sun in the hard X-ray (HXR) regime, sensitive to energies of 4-20 keV. Through spectral analysis of the microflares using an optically thin isothermal plasma model, we find evidence for plasma heated to ~10 MK and emission measures down to ~1044 cm-3. Though nonthermal emission was not detected for the FOXSI-2 microflares, a study of the parameter space for possible hidden nonthermal components shows that there could be enough energy in nonthermal electrons to account for the thermal energy in microflare 1, indicating that this flare is plausibly consistent with the standard thick-target model. With a solar-optimized design and improvements in HXR focusing optics, FOXSI-2 offers approximately five times greater sensitivity at 10 keV than the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array for typical microflare observations and allows for the first direct imaging spectroscopy of solar HXRs with an angular resolution at scales relevant for microflares. Harnessing these improved capabilities to study small-scale events, we find evidence for spatial and temporal complexity during a sub-A class flare. This analysis, combined with contemporaneous observations by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory, indicates that these microflares are more similar to large flares in their evolution than to the single burst of energy expected for a nanoflare.