To celebrate the International Year of Crystallography 2014 and also its tenth anniversary, the Argentinian Association of Crystallography ("Asociación Argentina de Cristalografía", AACr) has launched a Crystal Growing Competition to be held during June-October 2014 among Argentinian high school students. This activity is sponsored by the IUCr, CONICET (Argentinian Science Council) and MinCyT (Argentinian Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technology).

Before the contest, a five hours course including the basic concepts of Crystal Growing and Crystallization will be offer for the teachers of the interested schools. They will take place at different regions of the country during April. The information of the contest together with the instructions on how to grow crystals and guidelines for teachers will be provided on the AACr website. After the students sign up, they will growth their crystals and create a video or an essay to show their work to the Evaluation Committee before the end of August 2014. The finalists will be announced on September 15th and invited to present their works at the X Annual Meeting of the Argentinian Association of Crystallography (Mar del Plata, Argentina, October 28-31, 2014). A special session will be held as a satellite activity of the Meeting on October 27th and the Awards Ceremony of the Crystal Growing Competition will be held on October 28th during the Opening Ceremony.

Through this exciting, funny and hands-on scientific experience, Crystallography and other related scientific fields will be promoted along the high school community across the country, being also a way to encourage youth to continue exploring Science and developing their scientific skills.