A virtual Summer of Science for the Outreach Team

In these strange times many usual summer activities have sadly been disrupted. However thanks to our outstanding reputation for science communication, Badminton School’s Science Outreach team was lucky enough to be invited to participate in virtual versions of WOMAD Festival at the end of July and The International Conference of High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in early August.

ICHEP is one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of particle physics, where theorists and experimentalists meet to discuss the latest breakthroughs in the field biennially.  With the conference normally being held in Prague this year, public engagement on the virtual Big Bang Stage was organised by CERN and many of the local committee members had been integral in organising the Physics outreach at the Colours of Ostrava Festival in 2019, where they met our first ever international team, leading to our invitation to help provide content for their part of the event.

A team of 15 girls signed up to help create two separate, but related talks totalling an hour of content.  The team led by Christy, Ellie and Lucia got to work at the beginning of July just as term ended, creating engaging scripts and helping Mr Williams to film lots of material based on colloids (WOMAD) and states of matter (ICHEP).

To help engage the audience and give parents a boost over the summer with fun activities they can do with their children, both talks contained lots of experiments under the moniker “Science at Home“.  Visual instructions on how to conduct the experiment were combined with explanations of the underpinning science.  The ICHEP video also includes material on particle accelerators and superconductors, as these are both related to states of matter and CERN/ICHEP’s work.

For ICHEP, we were joined by students from Bristol Free School whom we hope to work with more in the future.  They produced outstanding material on slime, covering how to make it and the chemistry that makes it work.

The girls worked as a unit, despite being scattered across the globe, seamlessly writing, filming and editing fantastic material which has been viewed more than 1,000 times on YouTube across both events.  If you would like to share in some of the fun, please click on the links below:

ICHEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBvjhkjzFC0&t=2701s 

WOMAD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFpophM-6VE 

We hope you will be inspired to give some of the Science at Home experiments a go yourselves!

With huge thanks to everyone involved.