FAQ

Yes, by participating in Mission ALBA, you’ll cover many of the core 5th and 6th-grade primary curriculum areas with practical hands-on activities. The teaching guide outlines the correlations between the areas worked on in the challenges and the curriculum in your autonomous region.

The teaching guide contains detailed lesson plans and an overall schedule, based on 14 lessons lasting 50 minutes to an hour each.

Both the challenges are suitable for 5th and 6th-grade primary students and can be undertaken on a stand-alone basis; you do not need to have completed one before attempting the other. If this is your first Mission ALBA, we recommend starting with the first challenge, "Make the invisible visible”, because it covers a substantial part of the curriculum for this key-stage. The second challenge takes a more interdisciplinary approach, perfect for those who’ve already completed the first or want to work in a more cross-cutting way.

The project has been designed so that any teacher can easily tutor the project with the help of the teaching guide, which provides detailed guidelines, and the work plans, which offer a step-by-step guide to carrying out the experiments. We recommend, however, that you review all the materials thoroughly to familiarise yourself with the concepts and plan the lessons properly.

Each team (class-group) may only participate in one challenge per course, but if you have several teams because you manage more than one class, you can work on one challenge with one team and the other challenge with another.

Each class/team will receive a welcome pack. The pack contains a sample of some of the materials required for the mission experiments and a surprise for the students. Schools are responsible for sourcing the remaining material required for the experiments, which is all readily available and easy to find. The welcome pack does not contain the printed information or worksheets that students will complete in class. These can be downloaded when you have access to the platform.

Yes, the videos will introduce you to some of the people who work at ALBA and their role at the facility. What’s more, in each laboratory, you can win a video-conference with the people who will have guided you through the experiment. In addition, all the teams that complete the mission successfully will be entered into a draw to win a class visit from a researcher.

For the 2020-2021 course, the mission will take place during the second trimester, from the 8th of January to the 15th of May. There’s a suggested schedule for each of the 4 laboratories in the teaching guide. Each group can go at the pace they wish, although to participate in the prize draws, each laboratory must be completed within the established period. 

For the 2020-2021 course, the Mission ALBA website and all the teaching materials are available in both Spanish and Catalan. The work plans with the proposed experiments for the students can also be downloaded in English.

Yes. You can create several teams and assign each one a mission from your teacher profile area. That way, each class-group will have its own space on the platform to follow its progress.

Write to us at misionalba@cells.es and we’ll contact you to offer support in any way we can.

Participation in Mission ALBA is completely free. The school will only need to cover the cost of the materials required for the experiments. All the experiments have been purposefully designed to use materials that are readily and cheaply available. You can find the approximate cost in the teaching guide.

No. Your username and password will still be valid. Log in to your profile as normal. If you’ve forgotten your password, you can reset it using the link that appears in the registration section. If you can’t remember the email you used to register previously, let us know at misionalba@cells.es.

No. While the project aims to offer students a hands-on experience, it’s implemented entirely online.

The teams that complete each laboratory successfully will be entered into a draw to win the prize for that stage, and those that complete all four stages successfully will be entered into the draw for the final prize. There are five prizes up for grabs, one prize for each of the four laboratories, and a final prize at the end of the mission.

Just as we did in the 2019-20 academic year, Mission ALBA will adapt to any future changes in circumstances brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. The laboratory sessions can be tweaked so that students can carry out the experiments at home and fill in the questionnaires online. This system was tested with excellent results in March-June 2020.