Category: STEM

Ep 8 – Destination Detonation: Renee Watson and her journey to The Curiosity Box

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July 6, 2018

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“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

There are many people in life who are passionate about STEM, education and science, and who work hard to connect with children, to unlock a lifelong love of science. But outside mainstream education, it would be difficult to find anyone who has so consistently and brilliantly applied herself in the service of science and education as Renee Watson.

We have been excited to talk with Renee and share her story for a while. Partly this is because you cannot help but swept up in her revolutionary fervour – Renee and her team at The Curiosity Box are leading a bona fide Curiosity Revolution after all. But her own story is so utterly compelling and, well, unlikely.

(Listen now on SoundCloud – iTunes – Stitcher – for a comprehensive set of show notes, including links, analysis and organisation contact, consider becoming a supporter through Patreon – or email us for more details)

Growing up in rural Australia, with no obvious mentors or scientists to ignite her own spark (save one, which we learn about in this episode of Stories from Science) she is almost uniquely qualified to identify and connect to her diamonds in the rough. These are the smart, motivated, curious children who fall through the cracks of mainstream education and yet are exactly the kinds of young people who will see things differently, and provide the new ideas and creativity in science that will solve problems and move society forward.

After tremendous success in science – academically and commercially through her WATS.ON consultancy, Renee set up The Curiosity Box two years ago. She has built a team – and created an ethos – that has led to awards, recognition, and earlier this year she was called out by philanthropist Melinda Gates as one of eight women in STEM to watch worldwide.

The Curiosity Box allows children and their families to do science and experiment in their own homes through a subscription service which sees a regular box crammed full of science fizz through the letterbox (metaphorically), with the aim to make science as common a topic to discuss around the kitchen table as politics and TV shows.

She is ‘Head of Explosions’ at The Curiosity Box – but she is also motivated by social justice, untapped potential, entrepreneurship and a lot of love: for science, and for the families that share back what they do with the science they get sent.

It’s difficult not to get swept up in this enthusiasm for revolution. In this inspiring hour-long interview, we discover why science capital is like carrying a suitcase, we learn the constituent parts of Unicorn Poo, and go toe-to-toe with STEM Barbie.

Ep 5 – Can a Science Festival change the world? The ATOM Festival of Science and Technology 2018

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May 14, 2018

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In this special episode of Stories from Science, we go behind the scenes of a very modern phenomenon: the Science Festival.

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Specifically, we peek behind the curtain of the ATOM Festival of Science and Technology, which has taken place in Abingdon-on-Thames every year for the last five years. This year’s festival took place in March 2018, and – in spite of a sudden and dramatic snowfall on the final weekend – was a huge success.

Kicking off with the Science Market (think Farmer’s Market but with science!) a whole week of talks, hands-on science activities, school’s outreach, and quirky science events culminated in the Family Science Day which saw over 500 people descend on the Yang Science Centre putting on VR goggles, looking at friendly (and not so friendly) microbes, messing around with fire, bubbles, dinosaurs, making cars and rockets – and learning about the scale of the universe.

In this episode we speak to the people involved in ATOM: the speakers, communicators, organisers and audience who came along.

Along the way, we’ll discover the peculiar properties of Iron Selenide, discover how much fun you can have with liquid nitrogen, and learn that even if you never liked science at school, there are still plenty of opportunities for you to have a career in science.

What Science Festivals do may seem obvious – lots of entertaining science events to inspire young and old alike – but when you pick apart a festival like ATOM, the results are more far-reaching, and – in at least one surprising instance – rather profound with implications for new opportunities for business and academia.

For ATOM, this is partly due to its special location in the Science Vale – between the science centres of Culham, Harwell and Oxford.

But there are lessons for everyone involve in science communication, outreach, events and other festivals. We hope this podcast gives you loads of inspiration and – for anyone involved in a science festival – ideas to help your festivals thrive.

Because the benefits of a well-run, community-centred science festival have all kinds of implications: for business, academia, town centre regeneration, inclusivity, education and community cohesion.

Ultimately we are talking about ‘Science Capital’ – a way in which science becomes embedded within a community, for the benefit of all, with impacts felt far and wide.

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Ep 4 – Shooting for the Moon with the next generation: Fran Long of Sublime STEM

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April 13, 2018

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The teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – STEM – is possibly *the* hot topic in education at the moment. It’s no exaggeration to say that we need hundreds of thousands of new scientists and engineers in the coming years, but in a time of huge educational challenges, how exactly do you inspire and ‘hook’ young children on science, and give them the hunger and resilience to succeed in STEM subjects for the long term?

(Listen now on SoundCloud – iTunes – Stitcher) – for a comprehensive set of show notes, including links, analysis and organisation contact, consider becoming a supporter through Patreon – or email us for more details)

Even the government’s own figures are stark: we need 20,000 more engineering graduates every year just to replace those retiring from the profession. But the challenges in STEM teaching are not just getting more students to pick subjects to study at university: how do you get school pupils to stay the course in secondary school, where do we get the resources from, and what exactly should children be doing not just to learn about STEM but see themselves as engineers and scientists in the future?

To begin to get some answers, we had an inspirational chat with Fran Long of Sublime STEM, educator and Primary Science Specialist. Her passion and enthusiasm for getting primary school children hooked on science is all the more remarkable considering the fact that she struggled with science herself when at school.

Fran’s path into STEM teaching started in perhaps the last place you might have thought: working out how to boost literacy and ‘reading for pleasure’ amongst primary age children (another urgent concern in schools). Fran adopted a very scientific approach to the problem, trying different things, and getting hard data to provide evidence of what worked.

This approached grew into ‘start local’ philosophy of STEM teaching, in which she reached out to everyone from school parents to global companies, and in the process turned dry curriculum science topics into interactive spectacles to wow young people.

Earlier this year, her hard work paid off: Fran won the UK’s Primary Science Teacher Award.

This episode of Stories from Science is both eye-opening and contains a lot of pieces to the STEM puzzle. We discover why children need to get hooked on science by age 10, why family involvement is crucial and why current methods of encouraging girls into STEM might be counter-productive.

We explore why you need good storytellers in science, and we look at the networks and organisations that exist right now to help teachers and parents inspire children in science. Above all we link literacy to science in a way that would make CP Snow proud.

The interview lasts about 45 minutes, which is no time at all for all the topics we touched upon. But with Fran starting a new role with the Natural History Museum in Oxford we’re sure to be inviting her back for a follow-up…

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We have produced a comprehensive set of show notes, including links, analysis and organisation contacts. Members of the Stories from Science community automatically get access to these by becoming a supporter through Patreon – or email us for more details.

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Ep 2 – How to win friends and STEMfluence people

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March 21, 2018

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During 2015, anyone driving down Faringdon Road in Abingdon would have seen an impressive building taking shape on the edge of the campus of Abingdon School. But as the bulk of the work on its new £14 million Science Centre progressed, behind the scenes the school was wrestling with a problem.

Tensions between public and private education are well-known and raise strong feelings on both sides. From the outset the school was committed to providing significant public access – and thus benefit – to the science centre, but just opening up the labs, even with the help of skilled technicians, wasn’t much of an option. Aside from practical safety considerations, the big challenge was to translate the needs and requirements of science users in the wider community into co-ordinated activities – and leverage resources available through wider STEM programmes across the UK.

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The solution was to recruit a specialist science teacher and have that teacher spend 50% of his or her time co-ordinating activities, partnerships and connections to schools organisations in the local community and around the UK. The result was the Abingdon Science Partnership – and the results have been both impressive and significant.

On March 6, we travelled across Abingdon to meet with Megan Milarski and Jeremy Thomas at the Partnership (or ASP as it’s known to those in the know). Now three years old, it’s an almost unique science outreach organisation, but its success is offering up a template which might be replicable in other parts of the UK.

The sheer range of activities, clubs, services and partner organisations sometimes makes it difficult to neatly summarise the ASP, and so our interview was an ideal opportunity to dig down and understand the ambitions underlying the partnership. In doing so, we explore how the ASP works with local primary and secondary schools, scouting organisations, and partner organisations such as the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), the Young Scientists Journal, Polar Explorers Programme, the Ogden Trust, CREST and many more.

Along the way we took a detour to the Southern Ocean, found a neat way of combining STEM and exercise – and explored the critical concept of ‘Science Capital’ in society.

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(Update 1: two weeks after we conducted the interview, on Sunday March 18, over 500 people – mostly Abingdon-based families – attended the free Family Science Fair hosted by the Abingdon Science Partnership as part of the annual ATOM Festival and Science and Technology. It was a fitting example of the potential – and power – of the partnership, around which ATOM volunteers, University outreach groups, local schools, and science engagement organisations such as Curiosity Box and Bright Sparks Science coalesced to produce a stunning hands-on science event. You can see images from that event here.)

(Update 2: In April 2018, the Abingdon Science Partnership were shortlisted in the ‘Contribution to local community’ category for the #tesFEawards TES FE Awards 2018. This is a significant recognition of their work and activities, and wish them the best of luck when the awards are announced later this year)