Explorathons and Teacakes
An evening of chaotic exploration at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow
One of the things we have learned from our involvement in public engagement events is that it takes a huge amount of preparation to look spontaneous. Behind the fun and organised chaos are months of meticulous planning and a detailed health and safety checklist. We are always grateful to the organisers of events like MozFest and the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend who put in a tremendous amount of work to provide a platform for researchers to communicate their work to members of the public in such fun and dynamic environments.
The Explorathon Extravaganza headed up by Dr Jamie Gallagher took place in September last year and was just such an event. Over 200 hundred cities across Europe, including Glasgow, take part in the annual European Researchers’ Night — a celebration of research and researchers, and of the importance of creative and meaningful public engagement. The Glasgow hub invited researchers to share their work and ideas in a number of different free and public venues across the city. The Digi Trans team set up shop in the Riverside Museum, one of over 30 research groups who spent a very busy evening chatting to the hundreds of visitors. Indeed, attempts to count the number of visitors who stopped at our station were quickly abandoned!
Our station, James Watt and the Eighteenth Century 3D Printer, aimed to introduce people to 3D printing technology while also chatting about the history of Watt’s workshop. Those of you familiar with our Theme and the blog will know that the eighteenth century engineer has become something of an unofficial Digi Trans mascot. We have used James Watt’s story at a number of events — exploring, for example, the connections between his methods of working and contemporary ‘Maker spaces’ (see our previous post on the subject, here).
For the Explorathon, we decided we would take a more flexible ‘show-and-tell’ approach, allowing visitors to pick up and play around with a variety of different objects. We took our 3D printed heads of James Watt, several Google Cardboard VR viewers, and a MakeyMakey kit. And in the interests of staying on brand, we also took post-it notes and marker pens.
There was no intended ‘pathway’ through the station and visitors were free to pick up and interact with whatever they were most interested in. The Google Cardboard viewers proved popular with adults and children alike. We had loaded the free Cardboard app on a few devices and visitors took virtual tours of the Arctic in the middle of the Riverside Museum. Some of the parents were surprised to learn that the app would work on their own mobile devices and that the cardboard viewer can be purchased for around £12 — or that Google provides instructions to build your own.
The MakeyMakey GO kit requires no coding expertise, can be purchased for around £15 and will connect to laptops or desktops via USB. The relative simplicity and affordability of the objects at our research station was a deliberate choice. Demonstrating 3D print technology is fun and engaging but most people are unlikely to purchase a home version. Small, affordable pieces of tech such as the Google Cardboard or MakeyMakey kit can provide an entry point for learning about digital technologies.
Unsurprisingly, the MakeyMakey proved very popular with our younger visitors. The kits allow you to turn everyday items such as fruit or plasticine into touch-boards and connect them to your laptop or desktop — provided the object is conductive, the creative possibilities are endless. Larger kits, for example, can be used to create a banana piano — a quick search on Youtube will provide plenty of demos!
Our Explorathon ambitions were slightly more modest and we took along various pots of brightly coloured plasticine which the kids could connect to our laptop via a crocodile clip. We also took along a stack of Tunnocks Teacakes, a popular foil-covered Glaswegian sweet treat containing sticky marshmallow and chocolate. These proved to be very conductive and a roaring success. The kids had enormous fun prodding the teacakes which would start and stop a video of a 3D printer printing James Watt’s head. Luca chatted to the kids about conductivity and basic programming, quickly realising that all attempts to keep exited little marshmallow fingers away from the laptop keys were futile! Rather mysteriously we ended up with far fewer teacakes than we began with…
It was striking that the kids seemed to be as excited by the wires and clips as by the plasticine and teacakes. They enjoyed clipping and connecting and playing around with the multi-coloured wires. The combination of silliness, tactility and problem solving perhaps offered a different sort of digital experience than the kids were used to. Screens and devices are clean, self-contained and our young visitors were no doubt experts in navigating apps and devices at home and school— this activity, by contrast, was messy and bitty, and got them thinking about making and breaking digital technology.
The teenagers and adults tended to drift towards the 3D printed heads of James Watt and the copies of Engineering the Future we had taken along. Many assumed we were experts in 3D printing and/or engineers — when we told them Luca and I’s research backgrounds were musicology and book history respectively, they were amused and confused in equal measure! But it highlighted one of the things we have learned from these sorts of events — people are interested in what researchers and academics do on a day-to-day basis. And they are particularly fascinated by interdisciplinary work and in projects that involve researchers from a range of sectors. Given the breadth and scope of projects funded by the Digital Transformations Theme, we have plenty of examples to show and tell.
One of the highlights of the evening was chatting to a senior school student who was interested in both science and history and was debating what path to choose at university. Excited by the various connections between researchers and disciplines on display at our station and in the Explorathon as a whole, she decided she wanted to do both and become a historian of science! And that, really, is what these events are all about.
