My journey to starting a PhD has been hugely influenced by
my participation in outreach. But I’m not just a participant. Being a provider
or organiser of outreach is just as rewarding (or possibly more).
I’ve been helping with and running outreach and public
engagement activities since I was in secondary school. I started by helping to
run a Saturday Science club for primary school children and it’s steadily
progressed from there. I’ve taught in schools, I’ve demonstrated at fairs and
festivals, and I’m a Brownie Guider.
Outreach reminds me why I love Physics, even when nothing is going right
in the lab. Nothing can beat the satisfaction knowing you’ve helped someone
understand even the tiniest part of my research.
My most recent outreach event was a Science themed pack
holiday for my Brownie Unit. We took 13 girls aged 7 to 10 away to a
residential house for two nights with a theme tailored around their completion
of the Stargazer and Science Investigator badges. My friends and colleagues thought I was mad
to give up my weekend to look after and entertain so many kids, but I knew it
would be a fantastic and rewarding, if exhausting weekend.
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| Solar System Models |
The main part of the pack holiday activities involved a wide
game, where the girls (in groups of 5) went visited different stations to give
them different skills which would help them go on a ‘Brownie Blast Off’. There were four different zones: ‘Humans’,
which represented Biology; ‘Feeding Us’, for food science (and my Brownie unit’s
love of baking); ‘Building Things’, for Engineering; and ‘Exploring’, for
Physics. We also did several short experiments for Chemistry. The girls built balloon rockets, looked at
the cells under a microscope, made pizzas, and lots of other exciting things. As
part of the ‘Exploring’ zone, I wanted to teach them a bit about my research,
so we had an activity called ‘What is light?’ and another called ‘How cold is cold?’.
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| Cool Chemistry |
What is Light?
For the first activity they built cardboard spectrometers
(which I’d acquired from my department) and learnt about light being both a
wave and a particle and how colour is wavelength. They were very excited to see rainbows in
their spectrometers!
How Cold is Cold?
The question what is temperature gave the girls a lot to
think about. We discussed different forms of energy which allowed them to
understand that hot things move much faster than cold things. We played a game to demonstrate this, based
on traffic lights. The girls had a set area to run around in and four
instructions: ‘Hot’ – run; ‘Room Temperature’ – walk; ‘Cold – fairy steps; ‘Absolute
Zero’ – stop. The girls then played the game in different sized areas (or
boxes) to increase the density. The game allowed me to explain why we need to
cool atoms down to make precise measurements on them and lead into an
explanation of laser cooling when the more adventurous girls asked how we
cooled things down.
At the end of the weekend, we asked the girls about their
favourite things on pack holiday. Among the general ‘we got to stay up late’
and ‘we saw our friends’ feedback, los of the girls said that their favourite
part of the pack holiday was learning lots of new things. Straight from the
Horse’s mouth: Learning is Fun! And I'm pretty sure we've got a few future scientist in the unit!
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