jonwoodscience – Page 14

12 April, 201620 May, 2025

Why Big Bang Was Special For Me

Tell you what I loved about the Big Bang Fair this year. Over the four days, not only did approximately 75,0000 kids, teachers and parents grace the NEC exhibition halls, but a good number of stakeholders, presenters and volunteers. Many of these volunteers gave of their time from studies or work, many without costs or expenses. How do we support these ones? Let me tell you what we tried this year.

I was working alongside Sarah Bearchell of Sarah’s Adventures In Science, an Oxford-based, award-winning freelance science communicator who specialises in workshops for schools and community groups. She had reimagined her ‘Mischievous Matter’ workshop to run in a noisy environment with timed groups. There was a large element of getting hands-on with the experience and using all our senses to observe as a scientist.

24 March, 201620 May, 2025

Error 4 – Out of memory

Despite me sharing a visual history of my life on Facebook, the vast majority of people who read this would not have known me when I was at school. I’m sometimes asked what I was like at school and the answer is generally quite dull. I did what every other kid did, which was to keep my head down and keep out of trouble. The best way we could accomplish this was to spend a lot of time in the dark, waggling our joysticks.

While I was introduced to computers in junior school, it was quite limiting. Partly because the hardware in question was a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 and secondly, programming beyond the basics of “Hello World” was beyond the skill set of most teachers.

20 November, 201520 May, 2025

When I Was One, I Was Just Begun

During the chaos of being on tour I was asked to write a few lines about how the science communication scene had grown during the last 18 months. It left me pleasantly surprised.

In February 2014, Birmingham held it’s first Science Showoff and now has an established regular Bright Club too. These brought local performers and researchers together with not just the public but also practitioners from around the country. It’s been especially nice to see people come to one show, see how it works and sign up as a performer for the next one. It was wonderful to receive an email asking me whether there were any other outlets for performing science stand-up as they had ‘got the bug’.