Project News

The I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here! project is getting better.

The I’m a… enrichment programme engages school students with people working in STEM. It reaches the students that are often left underserved and supports all students’ science capital. It’s also an opportunity for your staff or members to develop their engagement skills through an effective, efficient and high-quality public engagement programme.

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From January 2024, you can choose a theme for your class’ activity at any time during the year.

Genetics in October ✔ Radiation in February ✔ General Chemistry in British Science Week ✔.

Whatever you want, whenever you want.

You can select a theme based on your current curriculum topic or from a broader range of scientific subject areas or special events. 

The core benefits of the student-led activity haven’t changed. Every class can:

• Learn about up to 30 relevant scientists through their profiles, including their CVs
• Connect with researchers in 30-minute, text-based online Chats

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From January 2024, you can take part in the online STEM outreach activity I’m a Scientist whenever suits you best across the year. 

Teachers and students will be able to connect with you at the time that is most relevant to their learning – so when a class studies genetics in October, teachers can request a Chat with geneticists and technicians working with DNA.

Your conversations will help students understand how their learning applies to the real world, but also that people working in STEM are just like them. It helps them see that they, too, could have an interesting career in STEM.

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The I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here! project is getting better.

From January 2024, teachers can decide on a theme for their I’m a Scientist activity throughout the year. No more waiting for a particular zone, they can choose their preferred subject at the time that suits them.

Their theme might be linked with their current learning, to show students how the curriculum directly relates to the real-world, or it might be a more general science topic.

Scientists whose work relates to the theme will be invited to a real-time, text-based class Chat and to answer students’ follow up questions.

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In 2008, Beijing hosted the Olympics, George Sampson won Britain’s Got Talent, and I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here hosted its first event: each Zone hosting 5 scientists and 25 school classes.

Over 2 weeks the students would put the scientists through their paces, posting questions, joining text-based Chats, and voting for their favourite scientist to make it through progressive rounds of ‘evictions’ before a winner was declared on the final Friday.

For 12 years that format remained relatively unchanged. Little tweaks here and there, but the core format — 5 or 6 scientists; 25 classes; 2 weeks, 3 times per year — stayed the same. It worked.

Until, of course, 2020. Continue reading →

Every year we try to look at our data to see what devices and browsers UK schools use to visit the site. This is data up to 2019.

Taking into consideration how visitors access the site, what they use to access it, and then see how much has changed over the past couple of years.

Our sites are mobile-device and tablet friendly, which is necessary as you can see the trend for using tablets in class is growing.

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Every so often (see here and here) we look at all our data to see how schools use the site.

Taking into consideration how visitors access the site, what they use to access it, and then see how much has changed over the past couple of years.

Our sites have to be mobile-device friendly, ready for tablets, which show a high usage – as you’d imagine. We’ve tried to make them more accessible for screen readers and phones. We pre-register all teachers and students, unless there are specific events which require teachers to register their students. Continue reading →

In the last year I’m a Scientist has developed more than at any other time since we launched in 2010. We’ve hired new people, moved offices, moved servers, launched and relaunched multiple international projects (Vietnam, Spain, and Kenya), started projects like I’m a Medic and I’m a Researcher, developed a new Live Chat system (see Tim Peake using it for the I’m an Astronaut event), we even celebrated our company 15th anniversary… And to meet the needs of all these developments we’ve created a sleek new theme for the site.

The ‘theme’ is like the skin of the website. It doesn’t really change the functionality, just the style and way it looks. This new theme is a huge improvement over the previous one:

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I’m a Scientist is about showing the diversity of science to students and whilst we’ve always been strong with biologists and physicists until 2015 we were a little light on chemists. So we are especially delighted that the Royal Society of Chemistry have decided to support our project over 3 years through to the end of 2017. We will be running 9 zones across the UK and Ireland using this funding. Part of the arrangement is that we’ll be including RSC members in five of our General Zones to show school students the full breadth of science. Rio Hutchings, from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Outreach team, says: We’re really proud to be involved in inspiring scientific discovery in a whole range of ways and I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here is an excellent example. It’s great for both students and for putting science communicators through their paces, … 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 →