Driving from Chicago to Buenos Aires: instrumentation courses during a road trip across the Americas

The Escaramujo Project (www.escaramujo.net) was a series of hands-on laboratory courses on High Energy Physics and Astroparticle Instrumentation, in eight Latinamerican Institutions. The Physicist Federico Izraelevitch traveled on a van with his wife and dogs from Chicago to Buenos Aires teaching these courses. During these sessions, groups of advanced undergraduate and graduate students built a modern cosmic ray detector based on plastic scintillators and SiPMs, specifically designed for this project. With the detector as a common thread, they were able to understand the designing principles and the underlying Physics involved, build the device, start it up, characterize it, acquire data and analyze it, in the way of real particle Physics experiment. After the five-days courses, a functional detector remained at each institution to train future students and to support and enable local research activities. About a hundred talented and highly motivated students were reached out with the initiative. Besides the aims to awaken vocations in science, technology and engineering, The Escaramujo Project was an effort to strengthen the integration of academic institutions in Latin America within the international scientific community.