On November 19th, the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) announced that LISER’s PSP Classic project "The GG goes ‘round! De GG geet ronderëm !" won an award for ‘Outstanding Promotion of Science to the Public’.

Lead by LISER researcher Carole Bond-Hanten, the giant interactive board game allows science and society to interact by raising awareness about gender inequalities and raising curiosity for scientific methods to break down gender stereotypes. Measuring 3 x 3 meters, this youth friendly game traveled throughout the country to 40 children ‘maisons relais’ and youth houses between 2019-2020.

The GG is a team project. I would like to express special thanks to the fantastic team behind it: Benoit, Blandine, Esther, Eva and Maike, and more recently Bérengère, Monique and Roland, as well as Julie and Manuel. My gratitude also goes to FNR who supports the GG since the Researchers’ Days in 2016.

I remember when we first presented the GG to the FNR, we did not imagine that the GG would have had such a success with the public. From our researchers’ point of view, this success is not only measured by the fun the audiences have while playing the GG, but also by the data we collect through a social experiment we run in parallel. This data confirms that there is need to work on gender stereotypes and to give people the opportunity to get familiar with scientific reasoning. In the meantime, we have played the GG in very different settings: at the Science Festival, International Women’s Day, as an internal training at the Stock Exchange, in Babysitter trainings, in municipalities. In the future, we plan to develop the GG in a scientific and technological way in a LISER-LIST collaboration.
- Carole Blond-Hanten