STFC Public Engagement Large Award 2012 Winners Dr Gail Cardew
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STFC Public Engagement Large Award 2012 Winners Dr Gail Cardew - Royal Institution of Great Britain The Crystallography Collection: an online celebration of the development, practice and impact of crystallography. 08/04/13 to 07/04/14 (12 months) £40,000 To mark the Crystallography Centenary of the Braggs' Nobel Prize winning discovery in 1913, a range of original multimedia content will be commissioned and produced by the team, including: A series of short films combining high definition images from modern crystallography research; A second series of short films shot on location at crystallography research facilities across the UK; Animated short films telling the story of crystallography and explaining the basic principles behind the research. The collection will engage students of science, teachers and the science-interested general public with the subject. These resources will be presented online and released to coincide with activities around the 2013 Centenary. The website will include a variety of features including interactive timelines charting the development of crystallography research, image galleries, and an events calendar showcasing public events in the UK linked to the 2013 Crystallography Centenary. In addition, the site will contain a blog with posts from experts in the field, a 'Best of the web' video playlist featuring the best online videos exploring the subject of crystallography, and social media tools allowing users to comment and share content. R.I. Partners and people include: David Keen from the British Crystallographic Association and ISIS, Stephen Hull from ISIS, Laura Holland from Diamond Light Source, Stephen Curry from Imperial College London, Mike Glazer from The University of Oxford and Clare Jones from The University of Leeds. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Edel Fletcher - At Bristol Science and technology providing solutions to global challenges - interactive teaching resources for students aged 11-19. 01/05/13 to 30/04/15 (24 months) £40,000 This project aims to capitalise on the inspirational stories of STFC research and how through the STFC Futures programme, some of the science and technologies developed are being harnessed to provide solutions to complex global challenges faced by society today, such as Climate Change and Energy. This project will particularly focus on the STFC Futures global challenge themes of Energy and Environment e.g. tackling climate change. This project aims to link the science that students are learning in the classroom with frontier research science, to help build inspiration and enthusiasm in students. The At Bristol project team will work with STFC scientists, Dr Hugh Mortimer, Dr Sean Paling and Dr Kevin Smith, and will create set of downloadable, online teaching resources for secondary school teachers. Such resources include: • Research scientists talking about their work in filmed case studies or sound bites • Datasets generated through At-Bristol’s schools’ workshops and exhibitions • ‘How to’ guides for students and teachers to carry out their own investigations and collect their own datasets • Datasets from scientific or other stakeholder related programmes that enable schools to compare their local data and provide a global context • Case studies of projects e.g. Environment Agency flood preparation and prevention • Animations, illustrations and filmed ‘live scribing’ to explain the intangible and demonstrate the science and technology providing solutions to global challenges • Projects for students and lesson plans for teachers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Jana Horak - National Museum Wales Back Down to Earth - Expanding D2E to Scotland and Northern Ireland. 1/7/13 to 30/6/15 (24 months) £50,000 The D2E project is a STFC-funded programme delivering high quality astronomy education resources in the form of meteorite loan boxes, online lesson plans and an online asteroid/comet impact simulator (available in 8 languages). The loan scheme is currently run from National Museum Wales, Cardiff, from where it reaches 5,000 students/year, (ages 10-16) and 3,000 general public/year through outreach - figures have been fairly constant since the D2E scheme started in mid-2007. This project will extend this successful formula, and cascade the experience to new partners. By providing additional loan boxes and teaching and management resources, we will facilitate the creation of two new loan hubs for D2E resources in Scotland and Northern Ireland, providing these countries with national centres for the scheme. These two hubs were selected as they have comparable national identities and organisations to Wales, and are run by the respective ESERO-UK Space Ambassadors. The experience in providing a national service in a small nation is of particular relevance, as is that of reaching geographically isolated and hard-to-reach communities. Part of the hard-to-reach programme includes provision of educational materials in a bilingual format, something not typically delivered by other science public awareness projects. For Scotland and NI, the hubs will be helped to produce Scots/Irish Gaelic versions of the key educational resource materials. Crucially, this project will extend its reach beyond the current regions of Wales to schools/museums who have expressed an interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr Shane McCracken - Gallomanor Communications Ltd I'm a Scientist, Get me out of here & I'm an Engineer, Get me out of here. 08/04/13 to 7/4/16 (36 months) £99,300 'I'm a Scientist, Get me out of Here' (IAS) and I'm an Engineer, Get me out of here (IEng) are free online two week events where secondary school students get to meet and interact with scientists and engineers. It's an X Factor-style competition where the students are the judges. The students challenge the scientists/engineers over intense, fast-paced online live CHATs. They then ASK them all the questions they want to, and VOTE for their favourite to win a prize of £500 to communicate their work with the public. The events are run online at http://imascientist.org.uk and http://imanengineer.org.uk. This award will help to create zones themed around STFC supported science and engineering. There will be 27 STFC zones, with 135 STFC facility users, engaging with 9,000 secondary school students and being read by a further 150,000 members of the public. Dr Ceri Brenner of STFC’s Central Laser Facility will be the head contact at STFC and will work closely with the team in recruiting scientists to get involved. Tens of thousands of questions will be asked and answered. Hundreds of thousands of lines of live chat will be written and responded to, and thousands of votes cast to decide who gets to spend the £13,500 of prize money. This project will allow scientists from across the country and from across the globe to interact with students, creating a level playing field for students. It will not just be the small number of confident and articulate students who get to ask questions and contribute. Scientists will be able to take part from their lab. Most public engagement activity is aimed at giving information to the public about science. IAS/IEng is about conversations led by school students. It makes the scientists listen as well as talk. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ms Siobhan Nicholas - Take the Space STELLA, a new play about women and astronomy. 29/04/13 to 28/08/13 (4 months) £11,530 This new play about women and astronomy will be on a UK tour from June 2013. STELLA tells the story of two female astronomers: Caroline Herschel from the C18th and Jessica Bell, a fictional radio astronomer from the C21st: Jess is invited to write about her favourite female astronomer from the past and so, Jess arrives in Bath to research the life of Caroline Herschel. The action of this piece unfolds as a double narrative: two women from different times simultaneously inhabit the same house in Bath. The intention is for the audience, whilst engaged emotionally in the personal challenges of both astronomers, to perhaps consider {consciously or even subconsciously} the concept of Time and Space. The premise of the play is that Caroline's concern for the astronomers of the future was a passionate driving force that fed into the rigor and exactitude of both her observations and her charts. This theme of Past and Future is fundamental to the play: we learn that Jess' daughter, in the midst of the Arab Spring, has become an intern at the new Library of Alexandria - and so the memory of Hypatia {350AD to 415AD}, the very first female astronomer, also ripples through the piece. The tour includes, amongst others, Greenwich Theatre, The Old Market in Brighton, The Mill at Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and the BT Studio at Oxford Playhouse. ----------------------------------------------------------- Large Award Scheme 2011 Winners Dr Teresa Anderson - Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre Big Science – Big Telescopes £76,500 The aim of this project is to excite and inspire 11-16 year olds, their families and the general public by engaging them with the 'Big Science' carried out with the 'Big Telescopes' funded by STFC such as the VLT, ALMA, e-MERLIN, and proposals such as the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array SKA. The project will produce an exciting exhibit at the new Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre on the site of the