December 2010 Archives
Please please please drop us a line: theteam@planet-scicast.org.uk. We’re desperately keen to learn from your experience, but also to promote SciCast to other STEMClubs. It’d be great to be able to offer a case study.
Thanks — Jonathan.
Arvind Gupta is an Indian science communicator who specialises in making toys from the sorts of stuff you probably have lying around the house. His website is full of terrific ideas and starting points, and his YouTube channel has hundreds of films like the one above.
Pretty much any of Gupta’s ideas could be used as starting points for SciCast films. In fact, they’re very similar to the things we used to do on CITV’s The Big Bang, which was one of the inspirations for SciCast in the first place.
Get making!
Richmond Council started running a magnificent local version of SciCast way back in the early days, and the National Physical Laboratory have this year taken over. You can read more about their competition here, but the important info is that tonight they held their glittering awards ceremony.
left: former SciCast winner, event organiser, and all-round irrepressible madman Andrew Hanson of NPL and Dr. Yan Wong from Bang Goes The Theory lead a massed wineglass choir at the event.
right: the wineglass attempt continues with a brave (ie. decidedly foolish) attempt to tune the audiences’ glasses to notes played on a keyboard left over from Andrew’s glam-rock days.
The nominated films were terrific. Richmond films have traditionally fared well in the SciCast Awards, and I very much look forward to sharing this year’s crop with you. They set a high standard.
Well, some do. Some are plain ridiculous. But hey, that’s SciCast.
left: Yan and Andrew ‘enjoy’ the results of their aural choreography.
Particularly welcome were a whole bunch of schools new to the competition, and we spotted several films that break new ground for SciCast. Four years and several hundred films in, that’s a heck of an achievement, and the sort of thing that gets me hugely excited all over again.
Big thanks to Andrew and his team at the NPL, and to all the schools and happy people behind-the-scenes in Richmond. Lovely to see old friends again, and to meet so many newcomers.
Yay!
