Flagstaff Festival of Science has ended, but not my blog!
Welcome back and thank you so much for following my work on outdoorswithcamera and WilcePhotos.com.
On WilcePhotos you can now read a personal account of what the Flagstaff Festival of Science is all about. Of course for me it is about photographs!
This new blog post is full of photos and personal reflections.
Let me add a bit to that post, thanking Brian Klimowski (National Weather Service),…
I blogged about my first day of volunteering at the World Science Festival Brisbane here. Now for a rundown on Day Two of volunteering. My one and only shift for the day was with the Microbiologist Apprentice program at QIMR Berghoffer where high school kids and their parents looked at the anti-microbial properties of plants, and used a fluorescent product to detect if the bacterial cells were…
As an informal educator, I've taught science in a lot of different places. Exhibit halls. Classrooms. A public park. A converted warehouse in London. A million-dollar proteomics lab. But if I had to name the wackiest experience I've ever had teaching science, it would have to be back in 2011 when I locked myself in a Ferris Wheel and taught riders about my research in cellular stress.
In May 2011, I participated in a "Scientist Roulette" for the International Science Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. For those who are unfamiliar with the science festival concept, a science festival is a celebration of STEM which features a multitude of city-wide public programming with everything from lectures to concerts to citizen science projects to political rallies. Europe has been doing science festivals for over twenty years; the Edinburgh Science Festival in Scotland has been going strong since 1989 and to this day remains one of Europe's largest science festivals, with programs extending out for weeks at a time.
At the time, I was putting myself through graduate school by working part-time for Göteborgs Universitets Department i Mikrobiologi as a research associate, "Scientist Roulette" was an event aimed at linking Gothenburg with their local scientists and researchers in a fun and inventive way. Fifty different scientists and researchers were put in different cars of iconic Gothenburg Ferris wheel, For two hours, they'd be joined by the public and one full rotation's time to explain their research.
Doing the “Scientist Roulette” event actually took a bit of effort for me. I was studying the stress response in budding yeast---not exactly sexy science. In microbiology, when a yeast cell feel stressed either by environmental or internal stressors, they accumulate little "granules" of RNA and protein molecules. These little "stress granules" help to sequester unimportant messages and machinery away from the rest of the cell body, so that the cell can focus on what needs to happen to get itself out of stress.
I had no idea what I was going to present. I had a small amount of room, 10 minutes of interaction time, and no idea if my audience would speak English. It had to be fast, easy to understand, and hands-on. After a bit of brainstorming (and a lot of translation help from my roommate, Annika), I chose to actually have my visitors make stress granules for themselves.
After introducing myself, I led each group of visitors in a small reflection on the different aspects of our lives we often neglect when feeling stressed. Then, I had them create their own personal 'stress granule' out of colored pipecleaners that represented different things we tend to forget when under pressure---like 'family', 'eating', and 'time'. After stringing them up inside the car, we'd talk together about how prioritizing energy during stressful times is actually common even on a cellular level---and how yeast cells often did this by literally balling up what was unimportant at that time away in little granules.
The activity actually proved to be really meaningful, as we often entered into discussions about how different our various stress granules were---that different people tended to forget or neglect different things when tired or stressed out. Many of my visitors spoke English, which was great, but a few utilized the signs I made that had directions facilitating the activity in Swedish. I got several surprised comments from visitors that they didn't expect to do anything while riding in the car with a strange scientist but they came away knowing something new and knowing a little something more about each other in only 10 minutes.
Given the prevalence of Ferris Wheels that are city icons in the United States, I'd say this project would be definitely one to do again and again. It really forces creativity in the way scientists have to communicate---plus visitors get a free ride in a rather unassuming setting where, worst case scenario, if they're not feeling it, there's plenty to look at.
