In this fourth part of our Science Capital in Practice: Foundations for the Future blog series, we explore some of the ways that the impact of taking a science capital approach can be tracked.
Our blog is written by practitioners, for practitioners, to reflect on what research into STEM engagement means for our day-to-day practice.
In part three of our Science Capital in Practice: Foundations for the Future blog series, we look at what embedding a science capital approach has meant for the work and across the different partner organisations.
In part two of our Science Capital in Practice: Foundations for the future blog series, we explore what the programme partners learned about sharing the science capital approach with their colleagues across their organisation.
In part one of our Science Capital in Practice: Foundations for the Future blog series, we explore how taking a science capital approach has helped partner organisations to build and broaden their audiences.
We talk about engagement a lot in our work, it is at the heart of everything that we do and we use it to describe and measure the value and benefit of our experiences. However, it can be a hard word to define. Beth Hawkins explores ‘what exactly do we mean when we talk about engagement?’.
Maxwell Hamilton describes how we challenged ourselves to reflect on the everyday examples, and the language we used in content we created for BBC Bitesize Daily as part of Science Week. He shares how we worked to make the content relevant to the audience of at home students.
Our Great Object Hunts invite people to follow their curiosity and find everyday examples and applications of STEM both in and beyond our museums. Charlotte Pike, resources Learning Producer shares why these are such a popular activity, and the work that goes into developing them.
Jess Sashaw shares the development of our maths themed image banks and how we’ve brought to life some of the stories behind objects in our collection. She discusses how they help promote discussion, develop confidence and ownership and how they have help relate maths to everyday life.
Hands-on making activities are an essential part of our learning resources offer. Our activities use easy to find materials and give people the opportunity to get creative with science and maths at home and in the classroom. Jess Sashaw discusses our newly developed set of maths resources.
Our engagement reflection points help us make our experiences relevant to as wide an audience as possible. Jess Sashaw has been developing our maths engagement offer, and shares how the reflection points can help people feel more connected to maths.
Laura Bootland, Interpretation Developer at the National Railway Museum, and the Project Lead for the Brass, Steel and Fire exhibition, shares how the science capital research informed the development of the temporary exhibition.
In the second of two posts, Lauren Ding discusses the process of turning our downloadable hands-on resources into easily sharable videos, exploring how we used our engagement reflection points to make them as accessible as possible.