🌐 Connected New Voices ✨| From Galway to the World: Invite Your Kids to Join a Global Trial!

🌐 Connected New Voices ✨

is a growing series hosted by IGU-CGE to support research that invites participation, connection, and shared learning — across disciplines, age groups, and national borders.

We feature researchers, in particular early-career researchers who are reaching out to the world not just for data, but for dialogue around the world.

While our roots are in geography education, we know that good research doesn’t always fit in one box — and that education, at its heart, is always about shaping the future.

Especially the possible futures of children.

So here we are, the first post in this series. We have got a new voice from Galway, where many of us had spent nice time in summer 2024. Hence, we start from a voice from IGU-CGE and then the voice from the researcher who is a PhD candidate in Galway.

Recommendation from IGU-CGE:

Colleagues are seeking children (aged 7-12) to participate in a research study. This might be an interesting way to engage your kids this summer while they are home from school and to share an intellectual experience learning together. The blurb below explains the project and the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIiCUbt11ms

gives more information. While focused on health research, this really is an introduction to the scientific method (or A scientific method) and is applicable to both science and social sciences (social studies). Have fun with this!

Voice from the researcher and their team:

Researchers from the University of Galway, Ireland are inviting children (aged 7-12) on a global basis, to join an online research project that aims to help children understand randomised trials, build scientific literacy and recognise their ability to contribute meaningfully to research. The Kid’s Trial website walks children and parents through each step using fun animated videos and kid-approved language. It was co-designed with a children’s and parents’ research advisory group in Ireland, who collaborated on the project with the research group for 18 months.  

The Kid’s Trial is super easy to join, children can do it from home, and it only takes a few minutes of your time!

The Kid’s Trial invited children to submit fun, low-risk health questions they believed the trial should investigate. They then voted for their favourite question. The question they chose is ‘Does sleeping with a comfort item (for example, a soft toy or special blanket) make a difference to how well kids sleep?’ After that, participants came up with a plan to answer their question.

Right now we are running the trial where any child can join and be randomly put into either the ‘try-it-out’ group (sleeping with a comfort item), or the ‘wait-and-see’ group (sleeping without a comfort item) and participate for seven nights. After they finish their trial, we’ll email them to collect their results. Finally, kids can decide how we share the trial results with a global audience of children and adults.

To learn more, you can visit the website or reach out to us and ask us about the project. The project lead can be reached at s.lepage1@universityofgalway.ie or thekidstrial@universityofgalway.ie.