During the last few weeks, the student of the Ph.D. Program in Applied Sciences with a minor in Mathematical Engineering from Universidad de Concepción, Sergio Caucao, was doing a series of outreach activities aimed at students and Mathematics teachers at Andrés Bello School in Chiguayante, thus accomplishing the retribution required by the National Doctoral Scholarship from Conicyt, which supports his current studies.

Caucao conducts his thesis research under the guidance of the director of Center for Research in Mathematical Engineering, CI²MA, Gabriel Gatica, and Ricardo Oyarzúa, CI²MA external associate researcher and academician from Department of Mathematics of Universidad del Bío-Bío, UBB. Caucao was around three weeks collaborating with teachers of the aforementioned educational establishment through diverse tasks related to the teaching of Mathematics. Among them, he gave the motivational talk: Mathematics in Chile. Teaching, Research and Outreach, which was addressed to groups of student of third and fourth year of high school. “In this talk, we discussed the different options available in Chile to study Mathematics at both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In turn, the relevance of the Numerical Analysis of Partial Differential Equations for physical models of Fluid Mechanics was briefly described. Finally, and as a complement, the experience of a research visit at Loughborough University, United Kingdom, during June and July 2016, was also presented to them” Caucao explained. In this regard, teacher Odette Castro said that “students are always being motivated to move forward, and in this case, with the talk on Sergio's internship abroad, they got very encouraged”, the educator said.

In addition to these talks, Caucao also gave some lectures about the use of LaTex as a tool for the development of scientific guides and text documents, aimed at Mathematics teachers. Furthermore, he helped teachers from the Statistics and Probabilities unit to define the contents of the courses  for the students from eighth year of primary and second year of high school. Regarding this last activity, teacher Odette Castro highlighted that “the contents that were exposed to the students were complementary and consistent with what was taught in classes”.