Social media & science outreach and engagement

We love science, and we love sharing our passion for discovery and learning with others. There are only so many people we can reach in person, so how do we increase our impact and leave behind a lasting legacy? Wide-scale science outreach might be closer than you think – just a tweet or a website away!

Joy at the social media session

This week at the GeoScience Outreach course we took on social media – from Twitter to blogs, websites and videos – we pondered how we can use social media to communicate the key messages of our outreach projects to a large audience, and how to create a “brand” for ourselves. How will people recognise your project, what is unique about it? Will you have a logo, a tagline? Funny or serious, depending on your project, you might want to take different routes to increasing your impact.

The GeoScience Outreach course has a Twitter account and a website, and next semester, students will be writing blog posts about their projects.

Whilst talking about social media, making websites and creating an online presence, we also wanted to highlight that social media need not take over your life and university work. Websites are ever evolving, and tweets have a really short lifetime, so one shouldn’t overthink them. We had a couple of speed exercises during the workshop to demonstrate that it’s possible to brand yourself and get your creativity going within a short period of time. In just 5 minutes, we had wonderful ideas about logos, taglines and how they will communicate our outreach ideas. Afterwards, we all joined in some live tweeting – we talked about using hashtags, Twitter handles for particular audiences we wanted to reach, as well as adding images to make sure our tweets stand out.

Our popular tweet!

Our group tweet where we tried to use effective hashtags, relevant twitter handles, useful diagrams and dynamic images to convey our message that the GeoScience Outreach course is all about taking our disciplines outside of the university classroom.

While social media can seem scary, it can really be worth it to take the plunge and get your message out.  We may not have attracted the attention of the world with our group tweet about our social media workshop, but we did share a bit about what we have been up to on the course which within 24 hours has been “loved” by at least 15 people from our colleagues at the University of Edinburgh and beyond!

Here’s what some of our students thought about the workshop and the use of social media for outreach:

I tend to shy away from social media, thinking that it isn’t for me or I don’t have anything worth sharing, but during the workshop I gained an appreciation for the huge potential the platform has to connect people across the world and spread ideas. The session really highlighted the value of social media in a personal and academic context!

Lizzie Stanyer

I found it amazing the true breath of social media we could use to enhance our projects. There were some that I had not considered using such as wordpress which i now hope to incorporate into my project. I have decided to run a blog with all the wild foraging I do and also use it to post recipe suggestions for the things I forage. I saw from the workshop that this gives me the potential to reach a far wider audience than I would have otherwise.

Struan Johnston

Stay tuned to find out more about the activities of students on the 2017 GeoScience Outreach course.

A journey through time at Dynamic Earth

This morning, through wind, drizzling rain and chill air, we, the students, tutors and lectures on the Conservation Science course, made our way to Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth – a science center aiming to engage and inspire! Little did we know that our biggest journey for the day is still ahead of us – a journey through time and across the Earth’s biomes! We learned about how Dynamic Earth came to be and the science outreach that it conducts in the Edinburgh community, and then we were ready to go back in time – 17 billion years ago to be precise!

At Our Dynamic Earth the exhibits take you on a journey from the very beginning of the Universe with the big bang and the early days of Planet Earth.

The beginning of our journey through time – 17 billion years ago!

The big bang

Volcanos

Amidst the lava, flashing lights and even the smell of tectonic plates moving, a few moments stood as particularly exciting! First, we had a great conversation with Amelia, a female cartoon character explorer that welcomes you to Earth, as it was when life was just beginning. From the computer screen, Amelia said we can ask her any question we might have. Most of us rolled our eyes, as we didn’t believe a video cartoon character could possibly answer real questions. But sure enough, we asked, and we received great answers! We learned about dinosaurs, past extinction events, and of course, us being scientists, we couldn’t resist asking: “How does this work? It turns out there is a real person hidden away, whose movements and speech was transmitted to us via the cartoon character. Very cool! She even had an answer to “What is the meaning of life?” Though, we do have the one regret that we forgot to ask Amelia about our data analysis and statistical queries – she seemed to know everything after all!

The Our Dynamic Earth exhibits take you through the evolution of the world’s biodiversity including human beings.

Diversity of life in the tropics

A digital seal

The biodiversity wall

One of the high lights of the Dynamic Earth exhibits for Isla was the Arctic exhibit. The Arctic is cool and at Dynamic Earth the room is colder and there is even a life sized iceberg that you can touch with your own hands.  Having seen both icebergs and glaciers in situ in the Arctic, the iceberg at dynamic earth does a great job of replicating the real thing.  And sometimes it is only when you can touch something with your own hands that messages about climate change and melting ice in the Arctic might sink in.

The Arctic exhibit and the ice berg at the Our Dynamic Earth that you can melt with your own hands!

Touching an ice berg

The Arctic and what is below the ice

Flying across a glacier

We talked about science outreach and engagement activities as being “immersive” – we certainly were immersed – in plate tectonics, geology, biodiversity and how humans are changing the planet. Those of us that get motion sickness, were perhaps a bit too immersed in the whole journey! Nevertheless, we all made it through time and across the planet just fine, learning about science communication and outreach along the way.

Our visit to Our Dynamic Earth.

As we left Dynamic Earth, a tiny bit of sunshine was making its way through the clouds, and we were all excited for the outreach projects students will lead this year. We have gathered a wealth of inspiration and motivation for excellent science outreach and engagement, and we are now gearing up to turn them into action – stay tuned as our students, coming from diverse disciplines, such as geology, ecology, archaeology and psychology, develop and implement their project ideas!

What we learned from our trip to Dynamic Earth was:

1. Communication is really important in science. James Hutton, Edinburgh’s famous GeoScientist who is known as the “Father of Modern Geology”, was a terrible writer, which prevented his work being communicated during his life.
2. Even a very short experience can introduce a child or adult to a new interest or even career path – an outreach project can have a real impact!
3. Diversity of participation in science and other disciplines can be a really important thing to communicate through outreach. Can you think of any famous female GeoScientists? If not check out these inspiring women who reshaped the field: Mary Anning, Marie Tharp, Mary Summerville, Caroline Herschel and many more!
4. Outreach projects that are inspired by your own interests will likely be more successful.

Thanks very much to Anna for hosting our visit!

By Gergana and Isla

A new year for GeoScience Outreach

We are thrilled to welcome new students to the GeoScience Outreach and Engagement course! Geoscience Outreach is an innovative 4th year undergraduate course in the School of GeoSciences aiming to provide students with the opportunity to develop their own science communication and engagement project. We are all very passionate about outreach and are keen to share our love for science with a wide and diverse audience! As part of the course, students lead their own projects, resulting in lesson plans, teaching aids, leaflets, videos, and much more!

This year there is a great diversity of students on the course, coming from ecology, environmental science, geology, biology, psychology and archaeology – reflecting the truly cross-disciplinary nature of our course! We are looking forward to learning about our students’ ideas and their projects! Until then, we would like to take a moment to reflect on some of our course milestones so far!

We were short-listed for EUSA’s Teaching Award for Innovative Assessment – it’s great to know that students are enjoying the course, and now will be putting all our inspiration and motivation into action for the new academic year.

Isla and Gergana wrote a blog post for Teaching Matters, outlining what are our aims with the course and giving examples of various student projects.

GeoScience Outreach: teaching science communication ‘beyond the programme’ and outside of the ‘Ivory Tower’

You can also check out Isla Simmons’ Teaching Matters blog post about her outreach project about volcanoes – Isla is in her second your of being a PhD tutor on the GeoScience Outreach course!

Teaching volcanoes: the Geoscience Outreach and Engagement course

You can find some of the teaching materials developed as part of the GeoSscience Outreach course on the University of Edinburgh Open.Ed website – great to see how the work of our students can go beyond classrooms in Edinburgh!

The Sea-Level Story by Roseanne Smith

Volcanic Eruptions: an interdisciplinary approach by Isla Simmons

Nothing Goes to Waste in Nature by Jakob Assmann

‘Attention and Advertising Tactics’ Psychology Resource by Agniete Pocyte & Lorna Camus

Learn Averages with Pokemon Posters by Rebecca Shannon

Here’s to one more year of exciting outreach engaging communities from Edinburgh and beyond!

GeoScience Outreach goes to the Teaching Awards

GeoScience Outreach was shortlisted for a Teaching Award in the Innovative Assessment category – we were thrilled to be nominated and shortlisted, and appreciate the support of our students! Yesterday evening members of the teaching staff and students from the course attended the awards ceremony – it was a jolly evening and we were very happy to tell more people about our course and it’s goal – providing students with the opportunity to develop their own science communication and engagement project.

The Outreach Team including Colin Graham, Brian Cameron and Isla Myers-Smith at the 2016-17 EUSA Teaching Awards.

The slogan of the Teaching Awards aptly refers to “teaching heroes” – for many of us teachers can indeed be heroes – being able to instill not mere knowledge, but also the passion to continue to develop and apply that knowledge is a super power I want to have one day as a teacher.

Within the GeoScience Outreach course we have our fair share of teaching heroes – some of them now have a track record of being shortlisted for and winning various teaching awards. But what is special about the GeoScience Outreach course is that it’s not just lecturers and tutors that are teaching heroes,  so are students. Students  get to be their own teaching heroes – for the kids whose classes their visit, for the community groups they engage with, for the people their project reaches.

Teaching gardening to avid young learners!

It’s a whole new level of super power for a teaching hero to be able to empower others to teach and engage – I imagine it is a fine balance of knowing when to be the hero – the one who can solve a crisis in the happening – and when to be the sidekick – the support students need to fully realise their potential and maximise the impact of their project. I have been inspired and motivated by the abundance of teaching heroes within the GeoScience Outreach course – from lecturers and tutors to students – a fantastic team whose super powers I am sure will continue to innovate and advance science engagement in the future.

By Gergana, course alumna

Graphic Design workshop (InDesign)

Today we had a workshop on how to use Adobe InDesign for science communication, and in particular, for making posters. As part of the assessment for the course and general promotion of projects, students make a small poster that conveys the key messages of their outreach work.

Within the Geoscience Outreach course, we are very keen to develop skills that wouldn’t traditionally be part of the scientific curriculum – graphic design being one of them! Learning how to use InDesign (or Inkscape) can be great for any visual materials you make – knowing how to use the basic tools gives you a lot of room to bring your creativity to fruition.

What makes a good poster? We covered this topic by going on a beautification journey – first by looking at a poster from last year at different stages (bad, good, better) and then students started working on their own posters.

How can we use Adobe InDesign to make beautiful and informative posters? Check out the tutorial online to find out!

International Open Science Conference

The Geoscience Outreach course was featured as a case study in Lorna Campbell’s talk at the International Open Science Conference in Berlin, titled “Crossing the Field Boundaries: Open Science, Open Data & Open Education“! We are very happy to have our work reach a larger audience, and thank Lorna for her work!

Lorna has written a blog post about her talk, here is the start, and we encourage you to go over to her website to read more about open education!

This talk focuses on the interface between OER, open data and open science and our experience at the University of Edinburgh of promoting open education through the School of GeoSciences Outreach and Engagement course.

The title of this paper, “Crossing the field boundaries”, comes not from the domain of GeoScicences though, but from Maryam Mirzakhani, professor of mathematics at Stanford University and the first female winner of the Fields Medal.  In a 2014 interview Maryam said

“I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields—it’s very refreshing. There are lots of tools, and you don’t know which one would work. It’s about being optimistic and trying to connect things.”

A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces, Quanta Magazine, August 2014

The 2017 Geoscience Outreach conference

Today was the 2017 Geoscience Outreach conference, where  students get to share their projects with their peers and supervisors. Geoscience Outreach is an innovative 4th year undergraduate course in the School of GeoSciences aiming to provide students with the opportunity to develop their own science communication and engagement project. The projects students undertake span across several disciplines – ecology, environmental science, psychology, anthropology, and more! The conference gave students a chance to practice their science communication skills, which are at core of the Geoscience Outreach course, and of course, we were all very keen to learn about the diversity of directions in which students are taking their projects.

The talks covered topics ranging from ecology, environmental science, psychology, archaeology, geology, mining, carbon management, and more!

Agniete Pocyte’s project covers biological psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and teaches children about the real world applications of psychology, as well as possible career paths. How do we relate complicated terminology to what children care about? Agniete used clues to help kids learn about brain functions, thus overcoming barriers when teaching abstract concepts. Two projects used GeoCaching – a fun treasure hunt taking you back in time, allowing you to learn about the Earth’s history. Another project focused on communicating the concept of ecosystem services – one of the most important topics in environmental science education. Kids are educated about ecosystem services through interdisciplinary workshops, as well as by creating teaching resources, many of which will be freely available online tor teachers and parents to use.

Have you ever wondered why do we have volcanoes? Liz Elphick worked with pupils to explore this topic – particularly cool considering that in Edinburgh we have a volcano at our doorstep! Georgia Forsyth Sijpestijn is working with deprived areas in Scotland to improve numeracy and literacy skills, help children gain nutritional and agricultural knowledge and learn practical skills. Developing confidence and empowering kids to understand where their food comes from is a terrific outcome of her outreach work!

 

Students are working with a diverse range of communities from Edinburgh and beyond, for example collaborating with the Welcoming project in Edinburgh, National Museums Scotland, Friends of the Meadows and Bruntsfield Links, and the Edinburgh City Council. Several students chose to work with schools in Edinburgh, among which Eleanor Walker. Her project focuses on food sustainability and aims to take children on a “soil to plate journey” – and she is also making a website, so soon all of her teaching materials will be available online! As several members of the Geoscience Outreach teaching team are big fans of promoting skills in statistics and coding (check out Coding Club!), we were very happy to learn about Rebecca Shannon’s project, which teaches pupils about the scientific process by helping students develop skills in geography, statistics and coding in a super fun way – check out her Pokecology resources on her website!

 

A fantastic aspect of the course is that it goes beyond disciplines – we really enjoyed the psychology talks, and are happy to see great work towards teaching pupils about psychology and raising enthusiasm towards this discipline. We have an archaeology project as well – led by Rachel Nicholson in collaboration with National Museums Scotland. Rachel is helping with the future Ancient Egypt exhibit and will organise cool workshops!

 

Geology topics were covered as well – we have students working on promoting interest towards Edinburgh’s geodiversity and are very keen to see their final products, including a website, a brochure, and more! We also learned about student work towards improving Edinburgh’s waste management strategy, the importance of Earth’s magnetic field, and how we can diversify the Meadows. Check out Joe Boyle’s website for more details on his work in collaboration with Friends of the Meadows and Bruntsfield Link and the Edinburgh Housing Cooperative.

 

It is fantastic to see so many young people engaged in a diverse spectrum of scientific disciplines, and we are looking forward to sharing more details about the projects on our website soon!

 

Cultivating a culture where everyone feels encouraged to learn something new came out as one of the main themes of the conference, and it certainly is at the core of the Geoscience Outreach course!

Check out our Storify thread to learn more about the fantastic projects students are leading!

Geoscience Outreach on Teaching Matters blog

The Geoscience Outreach teaching team and students contributed to the University of Edinburgh Teaching Matters blog for the February theme of “Teaching beyond the programme”.

Teaching beyond the curriculum is at the core of the Geoscience Outreach course, through which students have the opportunity to design and lead an outreach project of their choice. Students pick scientific concepts they are passionate about and build an exciting project through which they communicate their ideas to the public. These outreach projects often go beyond science communication and instead actively engage communities from the city of Edinburgh and beyond.

For the full blog post, check out the link below:

GeoScience Outreach: teaching science communication ‘beyond the programme’ and outside of the ‘Ivory Tower’

GeoScience Outreach gets active on social media

The 2016-17 GeoScience Outreach and Engagement class is getting active on social media after our social media workshop this week.  We have set up our new twitter account and brainstormed how we can reach the widest possible audiences for our outreach projects.

Our next goals are to revamp this website and develop more web-based content across our outreach projects.

Some of our twitter goals might be a bit ambitious – will the first minister of Scotland like a GeoScience Outreach tweet???  Only time will tell.

Trinity Gardening Club

Small allotments, big ideas

Trinity Academy Gardening club is a result of the collaboration between Trinity Academy and the University of Edinburgh, represented by Gergana Daskalova. Creating and maintaining the club with joy and enthusiasm is the main goal of Gergana’s Geosciences Outreach project, called ‘Gardening with a mission’.

‘Gardening with a mission’ aims to teach pupils how to grow fruits and vegetables, to value farming and land resources, and to find joy and solace in the wonders of the natural world. Furthermore, it strengthens community links by creating bonds between pupils, local gardeners, and organic farmers.

Topics and activities

A gardening club is a wonderful opportunity to achieve interdisciplinary learning. Trinity Academy Gardening Club is designed in a way to complement and enrich the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. The club has a flexible schedule to accommodate the unpredictable Edinburgh weather. Rainy days are brightened up with exciting indoor presentations, activities and discussions. Fair weather gives us the opportunity to put all the knowledge we learned indoors in practice, as we start preparing our allotment for the new growing season.

For us, gardening is not simply a way to grow food and meet a basic human need for nutrition. We see gardening as a way to learn more about the natural world, to discuss the impacts of modern agriculture on the environment, to be creative, to create bonds between teachers, pupils and members of the local community.

We talk about gardens as a source of inspiration, and as a safe haven for urban wildlife. In our weekly meetings, we acquire new knowledge, form and share opinions, participate in quizzes and games, and learn how to set goals and work towards achieving them. Our discussions revolve around topics such as:

1. Why do people garden and what are the associated benefits?
2. How do we design a garden and what is complementary planting?
3. What pests and diseases might cause trouble and what are the solutions?
4. What are the environmental impacts of intensive agriculture and what is wildlife-
friendly farming?
5. How can we use gardens to build stronger and more environmentally conscious communities?

All the teaching materials from the Trinity Gardening Club project can be downloaded here. Materials represent a teacher’s booklet, an original board game, powerpoint presentations, activity sheets and more!