The Science Museum Group have been working with the principle of science capital for almost 10 years. Throughout our journey we have learned a huge amount around what this approach can look like in practice and what challenges we, and our colleagues have faced with it. Here we share our top 5 most commonly asked questions.
The 18th of May is national numeracy day which gives us an opportunity to reflect on and share how our Science Museum Group museums have been working to inspire and support maths engagement.
The Science Museum Group has developed a broad range of learning resources which are an important tool in encouraging science talk, showing science’s relevance to everyday life and helping extend the learning beyond our museum walls.
Andy Lickley, SMG Academy Programme Leader, goes through his favourite kitchen science experiments from the SMG learning resources website.
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.
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.
Following the success of our online hands-on activities, we want to further promote them to as wide an audience as possible. In the first of two posts, Lauren Ding, Digital Editor, Learning for the Science Museum Group, shares why we chose to develop videos.
Research around science capital highlights that there isn’t a single place, action or experience alone that will help improve engagement and equity around STEM. Our booklet pulls together science engagement and science capital research to answer the question, what role can informal learning environments play?
When you think of a science museum, maths may not come to mind. Our museums go beyond science and tell stories from all aspects of STEM. In the second post of our ‘maths engagement’ series, Jess Sashaw unlocks the maths behind some of our collection themes.
At the beginning of 2020, we started a project to develop a maths engagement offer for the Science Museum group Academy. Jess Sashaw, Academy Programme Leader, has been looking at our learning offer, and in this post reflects on the importance and value of maths engagement.
This summer the Science and Industry Museum had a full programme of solar related shows and workshops to coincide with the new temporary exhibition ‘The Sun’. Maxwell Hamilton reflects on the application of science capital research in this programme of Explainer-led activities and beyond.
In September, the Explainer team at the Science and Industry Museum reflected on their current practice and refreshed their knowledge of science capital. This posts shares the good practice happening within their programme and the opportunities the science capital approach offers.
As part of the organisational change series, this post shares some of the ways we started raising awareness of, and distributing, resources around science capital research to colleagues in the Science Museum Group.