Cat was voted the winner of the Climate Change zone in March 2016. Here she writes about using her £500 prize money on the Terrific Scientific Trees Investigation.
If you’d like the chance to win funding for your own public engagement work, apply for the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here: imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply
As part of the BBC’s nationwide Terrific Scientific programme, we devised a project to get primary school children out of their classrooms and learning about the trees around them. I visited several primary schools to trial the lessons and then the BBC invited all primary schools in the UK to take part in May/June 2017.
I appeared in a video to introduce children to the project. Schools would register online and then had the option to upload their results to an interactive map and submit detailed results to us at the University of Leeds. As part of the project, we arranged for over 40,000 trees to be planted across a number of tropical countries. My plan is to devise an activity, similar to Terrific Scientific, to send to schools in the tropics where the trees are being planted (this is what I’ll spend my remaining prize money on).
In the UK we spent £100 on tree measuring equipment (clipboards, tape measures, rulers), £100 travel to schools for testing, and £50 on tree themed educational equipment (toys and stickers etc). Overseas we spent £250 on activity packs and postage. So far, we’ve reached 3000 people!
