Which career to pursue? To have children or not? Where are there jobs, health and housing and where are they lacking? Where is there basic sanitation? These are questions that require decision-making, whether for your personal life or for Brazil. But how to make such decisions? Statistical literacy can help in the sense that it is the development of skills to read, interpret and apply statistics to resolve doubts or issues. And how to promote statistical literacy?

The answer is through a statistical poster competition, for example. Therefore, the IBGE, represented by the National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE), together with the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) and its Center for Innovation in Statistical Education (ICE), promoted the challenge of telling a story, using data and statistical tools, and illustrating it on a poster.

We are talking about the International Statistical Poster Competition 2024-2025 - Round Brazil, the national arm of the ISLP Poster Competition 2024-2025, promoted by the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP), a project to promote statistical literacy by the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), in partnership with the Internacional Statistical Institute (ISI), which took place in the first semester of this year.

With the competition over, the IBGE held the awards ceremony on October 13, broadcast live (watch here), from Casa Brasil IBGE, at Palácio da Fazenda, downtown Rio de Janeiro (RJ), where the exhibition of the winning posters of the national round was inaugurated.

Opening the ceremony, ENCE's coordinator-general, Jorge Abraão de Castro, highlighted the School's participation in the competition, being “a pedagogical curatorship of statistical knowledge. A poster is not just a summary, but a creative visual narrative that draws attention through its form and content.”

For ENCE professor Bianca Walsh, who also served as coordinator of the Brazilian round of the competition, “what you see behind the posters are different stories supported by data. And stories that are based on evidence have transformative potential.”

Proud to see the IBGE embrace the Brazilian round, Walsh highlighted the ten-fold increase in the number of posters received this year, mainly with the offering of cash prizes. “Before that, 20 or 30 posters would arrive and this year we received almost 200. This is unprecedented and what helped a lot was the offer of a cash prize by the IBGE´s Center for Information Documentation and Dissemination (CDDI), increasing public engagement.”

With an “elevated heart”, Walsh was moved to represent, at the international awards in The Hague (Netherlands), professor Diêgo Bezerra de Melo Maciel, and his student André Augusto Canizza, who ranked in the third place in the university category, with an analysis of the profile of use of generative technologies by Brazilian Economics graduates and their perceptions of satisfaction and academic confidence with the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AIgen) within the scope of statistical learning. The work had been awarded first place in the national round.

FURG professor Maureen Porciúncula, present remotely at the ceremony, outlined a history of the international award, contextualizing the Brazilian participation, active since 2009. “We have never had a Brazilian poster among the global finalists, we only had one statistical literacy project – LeME (Statistical Multimedia Literacy) – in 2019 and now it is our turn with the award for the Brazilian poster."

For her, the dream is to reach four digits (thousands) in the number of posters registered, as is the case with the United States, South Korea and the Czech Republic, countries that stand out in the competition. “We reached three digits with the 195 works we received, who knows, maybe in 2027 we will get many more. Competition is much more than promoting people, it is promoting social justice through statistical literacy,” concluded her.

IBGE's Educational Affairs manager, Marcos Balster, highlighted the fundamental role of the CDDI, which, through the IBGEeduca portal, "publicized the competition and provided a hotsite for registrations, with all the information about the tournament," highlighting that "the most important promotional action was the cash prize offered through Casa Brasil IBGE."

Award-winning teachers and students participated remotely and also spoke about participating in the national round. There were 12 winning posters, distributed in Elementary School I, II, High School and Undergraduate classes, in public and private schools and three public universities.

In total, 13 teachers and 43 students were the authors of the works that explored themes like health; artificial intelligence; immigration; transportation; adolescence; electronic devices; cultural formation of youngsters; leisure; dengue; cell phone use and even the definition of love.

Do you remember professor Diêgo Maciel, the one whose poster won the international award? Access the news here. He thanked teacher Porciúncula for encouraging him to sign up for the competition and highlighted that choosing the theme and finding a student who wanted to produce the poster with him was the biggest challenge he faced.

The exhibition

Marina Guerra, audiovisual producer, and Ivo Moraes, designer, both from the IBGE, developed the poster exhibition. For Guerra, the project prioritized “giving visibility and monumentality to the winning works.” Moraes highlighted the position in which the posters were distributed in a corridor at Casa Brasil IBGE, so that people who pass by there daily could see the banners and, if interested, would come in to see the exhibition. “The idea is to generate curiosity among those passing by, inviting them into the corridor,” added Moraes.

Do you want to see the 12 award-winning posters? Be sure to visit the exhibition that operates on the ground floor of Casa Brasil IBGE, from Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5pm.

Service:

Event: Statistical Poster Exhibition
Date: Opening on October 13
Venue: Casa Brasil IBGE – Palácio da Fazenda, Avenida Presidente Carlos, 375, ground floor – Downtown, Rio de Janeiro (RJ)
Stream link: https://www.youtube.com/live/i9OULVmFz4M