The Festival of Tomorrow is the place for science, workshops, and demonstrations in Swindon. This year 47,000 visitors interacted with it. At the Festival Finale, on Saturday 22nd February, we ran I’m a Scientist – Live! with support from STFC. Continue reading
Each year the RI run a youth summit on a subject related to the CHRISTMAS LECTURES. In 2020 it was decided to run the Summit prior to the filming of the lectures so that the views of the delegates could be communicated to the lecturers. However the Covid-19 pandemic intervened and the RI building remained closed to the public.
The decision was taken to bring the summit online and I’m a Scientist was chosen as the platform because of a strong record of safeguarding and working with the RI on the Lectures. Continue reading
“The Gold Standard”; “Diamond Option”; “Go Platinum!” There is a continual pressure to strive for the biggest, best, most committed options in life. Sometimes, however, we should recognise that our organisations and partners might not want, or be ready for, the “Ultimate Mega-Package.” In the Public Engagement sector there is a consensus that the best engagement is: two-way upstream involving researchers and interested public in-depth considered includes knowledge transfer novel and innovative* NCCPE “Perspectives on Partnership” Tool It was a real pleasure at last week’s NCCPE organised SUPI review seminar to witness Sophie Duncan and Paul Manners reveal their Perspectives on Partnership (POP) Tool to help universities and schools assess what type of partnership they have and desire. The tool recognises four types of partnership: Spontaneous Inspired Thoughtful Strategic The participants are then asked to consider a partnership from each of four participants perspectives: Researchers Teachers Students Partnership brokers I … Continue reading
Research Councils UK have announced the Strategic Support to Expedite Embedding Public Engagement with Research (SEE-PER) programme.
The aim is to help HEI’s and Research Institutes embed Public Engagement within their organisations and to address identified challenges stopping it being embedded.
I’m a Scientist is offering to partner with an applicant or multiple applicants for SEE-PER to help address issues of:
When we started I’m a Scientist we used our March events to allow teachers to test the event and for them to come back in June with more classes. That time after school exams when teachers looked for something to inspire kids was the ideal time. Times have changed since then. March remains popular as teachers look for activities to coincide with British Science Week, but June is no longer the most popular time of year. We think this is due to increasing numbers of schools starting the next year’s timetable and curriculum after exams and that fallow period is no longer fallow. November is where we saw some spectacular growth in 2015. We’re not sure what has driven this – we’ll investigate and we’ll rebalance when in the year we run zones. The other clear narrative from this graph is that excluding the lower than expected level of requests in … Continue reading
Being popular is a nice problem to have. We’re running a total of 10 zones in November in the UK. It’s the most we’ve done at this time of year. But it is not enough. As the new school year started we asked our list of over 2,000 teachers how many classes they would like for our November events. 202 teachers requested a total of 537 classes. The problem is we only have space for 250 classes. Up to 8,500 students will be missing out on science engagement this November. We spent an uncomfortable afternoon last week working out how to allocate the spaces we had. Should we prioritise teachers who been regular supporters and taken part in lean times? Or new schools so that more teachers get a chance to experience our little bundle of joy? Or rural schools? Or schools in deprived areas? In the end we capped … Continue reading
Science Learning+ is a significant funding scheme provided jointly between the Wellcome Trust and the National Science Foundation. Learning can happen anywhere and at any time. Science Learning+ is an international initiative that aims to understand the power of informal learning experiences inside and outside of school. The second aim of the scheme is to “bridge the practice and research gap” At a seminar in July aimed at providing an update on the Phase I project an interesting conversation developed about that gap between Science Communication practitioners and researchers. I heard one speaker talk about practitioners wanting to know if a hypothetical red headline would give a 3% uplift in visitors. I responded on twitter: Disagree that practitioners want efficacy. I use eval. for that. I want research to tell me if the activity provides good outcomes #slplus — Shane McCracken (@ShaneMcC) July 27, 2015 Not all practioners agreed with … Continue reading
On Saturday July 11th the Harwell Research Campus opened its doors to the public. 10,000 people were expected to come and see some of the most complicated and cutting edge science equipment in the world. Hundreds of volunteers working with that equipment were on hand to speak with the public and show them what happens. We created a Harwell Zone to allow visitors to text in questions. It was promoted using posters as above. The logic was that with 10,000 visitors some would not get to ask their questions, or may think of it later, or possibly be too shy to ask in person. It was a family day. Working with the over-worked (understatement klaxon just sounded) outreach team at Diamond and Harwell we set the zone up and promoted it to exhibitors. It wasn’t a great success. A mere 14 questions were sent. However in the interest of continual … Continue reading
One of the great things about I’m a Scientist as a science outreach event is its ability to bring together scientists and students from around the world. This March we had scientists from Barcelona, Paris and CERN in the same event as pupils from the UK’s most northerly school on the tip of Shetland. A place so remote that Oslo is closer than London. National boundaries are ignored. The event is currently running in Malaysia. After that Australia will be live. In the autumn a pilot will run in Kenya. In June a spin off event I’m a Geoscientist, Get me out of here! will bring together geoscientists from Oklahoma to Paris with schools from Peru, South Africa, Romania, Serbia, Poland and Bulgaria. It has long been an ambition of ours to do more with the event in Europe, but our timing was not great. The FP7 framework was coming … Continue reading
We’re always evaluating the online STEM enrichment activity, I’m a Scientist, to explore its impact and how it can be improved. Check out latest evaluation posts. We know anecdotally that participating in I’m a Scientist has a positive effect on students’ attitudes to science. Teachers tell us that their students were buzzing, and that they understood more about science. Students thank scientists in live Chats for an interesting lesson. They tell us that it is “better than Facebook”. But, being data geeks, that isn’t good enough. We wanted to know just how much we were affecting the students. Were we affecting them all by the same amount? Girls, boys, year groups? Did being more active in the event mean a greater change in attitude? Questions we ask students Thanks in part to the pilot work by Robin Longdin (then a Science Communication masters student at UWE) we ask every student registering for I’m … Continue reading
I was asked recently what the gender split was for students taking part in I’m a Scientist. I replied that we’d never looked on the assumption that since teachers took their students online it would reflect the school population. I’m never one to turn down the chance to crunch some numbers so I took a look. And was surprised. At registration we ask if the person registering is a Boy, Girl or A group of students (where more than one pupil is sharing a log-in). We have data going back to June 2012 and nearly 15,000 respondents to the question. Surprisingly it wasn’t a straight 50:50 split. So I then decided to look at it by year group. What we saw was that year 9 & 10 were significantly skewed towards girls. And that bias continued through to 6th form. Is that common for science outreach events?
In 2014, as part of a review of what we need to do over the next 5 years with I’m a Scientist, we looked at how visitors accessed the site and how that has changed year by year over the last 4 years. We also looked at how visitors registered as students differed from All visitors. The Student visitors probably give a fair reflection of school IT capabilities. In the graphs the student data is represented by dashed lines. We only have student data from 2011 when we started tracking registered users separately. View more data up to 2019, 2018, 2015. It was no surprise to see that visits from mobile and tablet devices were increasing but having 23.6% of visits from mobile devices in 2013 was a shock. Delving deeper it is clear that it is mostly questions that mobile users visit. Tablets tell a different story. For student tablet users … Continue reading
Science used to be so simple. Physics involved dropping lead weights, and swinging pendulums. Chemistry meant mixing two liquids and measuring the heat rise or change in colour. Biology was about identifying leaves and insects. But that has all changed. Physicists now use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to generate vast quantities of data to model how the universe is constructed. Chemists study molecular structures through crystallography through complex computer transformations. But perhaps the biggest change has come in biology. Geneticists are working out the details of the building blocks of life through sequencing genes. Epidemiologists are working out how disease spreads using computer models of millions of people. Neuroscientists are embarking on projects to recreate the brain using computer networks. Computers and the Big Data they generate are radically changing science. The I’m a Scientist Big Data season in 2014 will explore how computers are used in real … Continue reading
Last night five scientists researching different aspects of antimicrobials took to the floor at the FIS Conference at the ICC in Birmingham to take part in I’m a Scientist Live: Drugs, Bugs and Infections. Our five were: Mark Webber Richard Bax Amy Wedley Anne-Marie Krachler Peter Hawkey Our MC for the evening, Simon Watt, kicked off by spending 10 minutes interviewing Laura Piddock, Chair of Public Engagement at BSAC about the current situation in research. The scientists introduced themselves and gave their Science Facts and Fictions before the 100-strong audience launched with their questions. 30 mins later with time running out, Simon brought the event to a climax by asking the scientists to spend 30seconds telling the audience why they should get the votes and the winner’s trophy. The vote that followed confirmed that Anne Marie’s promotion of the IMI’s Summer School for Year 12 students was enough to edge … Continue reading
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On Tuesday April 9th at 7.30 the following five fearless neuroscientists will walk out under the glare of the spotlights in the Barbican Cinema One prepared to be interrogated by the sell-out crowd who have come to hear the answers to their questions. Only one can become King or Queen of the Barbican. Who will it be? Will it be Sarah Jarvis, our neuron network modeller who won the first heat? Or enthusiastic, thoughtful, jokey Jen Todd Jones who won the Brain Zone in our March I’m a Scientist event? Perhaps Mark Horowitz who travelled to London from Sydney in order to study depression will walk away with the prize. Could Brain Collector Pascal Durrenburger collect the prize for his charity. Or maybe Music, Mind and Brain maestro Lauren Stewart will be singing with joy as the winner. Who knows but it’ll be the 280 strong audience that decides on the … Continue reading
“Do we need a brain?” “Can you ever stop thinking?” “Why does depression come on so quickly?” One sign of success with a public Q&A session is that the public mob the panel afterwards with the questions they couldn’t ask during the main event. Thank you to all the scientists who hung around for ages after the events last weekend. Congratulations to Sarah Jarvis and Mark Horowitz our I’m a NeuroScientist – Live Weekender Heat winners. The events at the Barbican last weekend were a real blast. The place was packed. People queueed to take part in science activities about the brain. It was a great feeling on both days to come out of the green room to find a large audience of about 150 people already sat down waiting for our show to start. Saturday had a distinctly youthful feel to it. they were excitable, noisy and ready to … Continue reading
Over the years we’ve had great support from schools across the world taking part in I’m a Scientist. There is one teacher who has been involved from almost the beginning, taking classes from 3 different school across different time zones, onto the site. I can imagine the event helps english-speaking students at schools across the world keep in touch with the UK through science. Having science questions from students in Budapest or Singapore makes our events more engaging too. Some of the keenest students have been based abroad. But Our funding from the Wellcome Trust is for only 50% of our costs and is only for schools in the UK. That means we need to give priority to UK schools and this March we are full. There is a way for overseas schools to take part. If we charge to cover some of the cost for you to take part … Continue reading
As part of ScienceOnline (or SpotOnLondon2012) Karen Bultitude and I have arranged a session called: Can we work together to better evaluate online engagement? It’s taking place in the Steel Room on Monday 12th November at 2.30pm. We wanted to provide some context to the session. Here goes: Since you’re interested in ScienceOnline it’s fairly likely that you think online science engagement is important and going to get more important. Me too. I run a few online science engagement projects, https://imascientist.org.uk is the most prominent. It’s pretty important to me to know how well the project is performing. We need to know in order to improve it, we need to be able to tell our funders and we feel obliged to be able to demonstrate to all stakeholders that the project is effective. So we evaluate our projects using a wide range of methods: surveys, interviews, personal meaning mapping and … Continue reading
I was reading a thread on GM technology on the Debate Zone in SagaZone and saw these three comments: That’s because I’m not a scientist. I’ve asked in this thread for articles that don’t support my opinion but as yet no one has furnished them. I’m guessing it’s harder to find them than the ones that support me. My guess is that we are not sufficiently interest to bother That’s fine, I’m not asking anyone to contribute to the thread. Although there are those sufficiently interested to join in I see It was apparent during our GM Food Zone event and the evaluation afterwards that that people who opposed GM technology were far more likely to comment than those who were in favour of it. The comments above however demonstrate the danger of that. A vacuum will be filled. If people who support research into controversial technologies do not speak … Continue reading
I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here is an online activity where school students get to meet and interact with scientists.
It’s a competition between scientists, where the students are the judges.
Students challenge the scientists over intense, fast-paced, online live Chats. Then they Ask the scientists all the questions they want to, and Vote for their favourite scientist to win a prize of £500 to communicate their work with the public.