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19/06/2013

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Blog

Welcome to the blog, you can read all about the latest news for the sections and take a look in our archive. Scroll through the latest posts below, or select a section from the dropdown.
Jun 12

What CREST Alumni did next… linking universities to local schools

by Ellie Chambers, Young People’s Programme Officer at the British Science Association.

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Students put in a lot of time and effort into completing a CREST project, and we don’t want the students’ journeys to end there. We encourage them to continue to engage with the sciences and engineering in a number of different ways, including through our alumni network, volunteering or public dialogues.

Deepesh volunteering at the National Science + Engineering Competition Finals 2013 (photo courtesy of NSEC)

So we were delighted to find out that one of our alumni was using his CREST skills to work with a local school as part of his biology degree.

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Jun 11

Social media and science: listening and learning

Marilyn's avatarMarilyn Booth works in digital communications within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), enabling policy makers to utilise digital and social tools during consultation processes and beyond. Prior to that, she worked within the BIS Science and Society team. One project she worked on was Public Attitudes to Science 2011, where she ran a blog for the duration of the project.

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I was involved with the previous Public Attitudes to Science survey within BIS, so I’ve obviously got a keen interest in seeing the results this time round.

Will we see greater engagement with science? Will people’s attitudes divide them up into segments, with different and multi-layered attitudes to science?

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Jun 03

Stephenson STEM club are CREST SuperStars!

Victoria Raynor is a year 4 teacher and STEM lead at Stephenson Memorial Primary School in North Tyneside. She tweets the STEM club activities from @raynor_vicky & @SMemorial

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STEM: a word so familiar now, that it is hard to believe that two years ago it had very little meaning to me. It all seemed to change in an instant when I attended an inspirational North Tyneside Learning Trust STEM conference in November 2011.

Year 6 students amazed that they have made their own glue!

The underlying message was clear; we need to act immediately to create a generation of children that have the skills and qualifications necessary for a STEM career. The conference certainly had a significant impact on me and the senior management team at my school, but I didn’t realise the changes that would occur as a consequence.

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May 23

Relating to robots

By Toby Shannon, Science in Society Officer at the British Science Association

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Popular culture has a complicated relationship with the idea of robotics – for each lovable character like Disney’s Wall-E and Star Wars’ R2-D2, there’s a Terminator ready to wreak havoc. Why do some robots provoke a positive reaction and others don’t? And what does this mean for the future of robotics in society?

The uncanny valley

One explanation for this reaction to a robot’s appearance is the uncanny valley theory – a graph that plots a robot’s likeness to a human against how comfortable people are with it; developed by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori.

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May 20

Behind the scenes: Working as an animator for Head Squeeze

Sree Kadalayil is a Belfast-based 2D character animator. After completing his Masters in Animation from Norwich in 2005, he has been working in the UK as a freelance animator/designer on projects such as James May’s Things You Need to Know Series 2, Yahoo! Finance and 360 Production’s YouTube channel “Head Squeeze”.

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May 13

What influences participation in science and mathematics? A response from the ASDC

by Dr Penny Fidler and Dr Michaela Livingstone, from the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres in response to the question posed in an earlier British Science Association blog post, when Professor Louise Archer asked 'What influences participation in science and mathematics?"

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A response from the ASDC

We were delighted to see the latest evidence coming from the Targeted Initiative on Science and Mathematics (TISME), particularly those dealing with science aspirations and careers.

The key findings chime with much of the work and goals of UK Science and Discovery Centres and science museums, as well as our colleagues working in informal science learning worldwide.

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May 10

Aspiring to great things: A response to the question "What influences participation in science and mathematics?"

by Annette Smith, Chief Executive of the Association for Science Education, who gives her response to Professor Louise Archer's recent British Science Association blog post, 'What influences participation in science and mathematics?"

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Aspiring to great things

Having a scientific training can leave one at a disadvantage when it comes to appreciating social science research.  There is a lot of talk at present about Randomised Controlled Trials in education, and as scientists, my colleagues would love this to be the answer to finding out what works in education.  In some cases, the RCT is a brilliant invention – in medicine it is essential, these days, and it can contribute enormously to education as well.  But, can we use science, rather than social science methods when it comes to acting upon the problem of the old leaky, or indeed non-existent pipeline, when it comes to acting upon the numbers of children who have the aptitude for scientific study but decline to make the necessary choices when the time comes?

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May 08

My CREST journey: A student's perspective

by Mythiri Sutharson

Mythiri is a year ten pupil from Hertfordshire, who has completed her Bronze CREST Award. She is a member of the CREST Youth Panel, a select group of Award holders who provide advice and guidance to the scheme and its partners, giving a voice to young people in the development of the scheme. Here, she gives her perspective on the unexpected benefits of doing a CREST award.

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How it began

It was a Tuesday lunchtime – the day I first heard about CREST.  I was sitting in one of the Chemistry labs, listening to my teachers explaining about CREST. It fascinated me; but it still hadn’t really dawned on me what it was all about.

But by the following week I found my friend and I already starting to put together project ideas. We were really excited by this scheme, but it was deciding what project to choose. So we continued planning, unaware of the opportunities that CREST would bring.                                                  

You would not believe the crazy ideas that jumped in and out of our heads... “Nails!” (How were we going to test that?), “Chocolate?” (We would have eaten it anyway), “Fruit?” (Too healthy). We had too many ideas jumping around in our heads, but we were determined to find the right one, and we thought the idea that stood out the most was definitely hairspray so we began planning.

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May 03

What influences participation in science and maths?

By Professor Louise Archer, from the Centre for Public Policy Research at the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King's College London and the author of the TISME report, “What influences participation in science and mathematics?”

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‘Luna’, a friendly, thoughtful teenage girl, has always found science interesting and has done well in the subject. Throughout primary school she aspired to a career in science. But now, aged 14, she describes herself as more ‘arty’ and creative and feels that she is not clever enough to study science further.

Like many of her peers, Luna illustrates some of the burning issues facing science educators. Namely, what influences participation in science and maths? And how might we encourage more young people to study science and mathematics at A level and beyond? Our new report tries to answer these questions.

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Apr 29

Hold the front page: The public’s not stupid

By Sue Hordijenko, Director of Programmes at the British Science Association and Louise Ogden, Web Editor at the British Science Association

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We have just evaluated the first ten months of Sciencewise-ERC – the expert resource centre that helps policy makers to understand and use public dialogue to inspire, inform and improve policy decisions around science and technology.

Sciencewise helps to set up and run sessions with members of the public, known as public dialogues, to discuss with them everything from their views on a particular area of scientific research, to their thoughts on a new or upcoming piece of policy, or to determine how informed they are on a topic.

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