Developing Plus podcasts - communicating maths via new media to reach a new audience

Plus podcasts - communicating maths via new media to reach a new audience Plus (www.plus.maths.org), the award-winning free online magazine, introduces non-expert readers from age 15 onward to the world of mathematics. We now want to try to reach a wider audience by producing a series of podcasts. Podcasts are sound recordings (often similar to small radio shows) available on the internet that can be downloaded onto personal computers or portable music players (like iPods). A growing number of people are taking advantage of podcasting to access news, information and entertainment. Plus will provide this audience with accessible and engaging reports from the world of mathematics. This way Plus will reach a wider audience, particularly younger people who through podcasting are accessing material to which they wouldn't otherwise be exposed. The project will provide an interesting new tool for teachers and will improve access for the visually impaired to Plus content. It is estimated that around 8 million people in the UK listen to podcasts, and that a third of podcast users are under 24, with 20% of podcast users between 12 and 17. This new audience may not have traditionally listened to news radio, but are being exposed to a growing range of successful news and science podcasts, such as the highly successful Naked Scientist's show, which has around 60,000 listeners per podcast. Many of the traditional media such as papers, magazines and major radio stations now produce regular podcasts - the BBC produces a daily news podcast that has over 700,000 downloads a month. Plus has been monitoring this growing medium over the last 12 months and we feel that it would be an excellent avenue to promote mathematics to the general public. In particular, it allows closer interaction between public and research scientists, as listeners will hear researchers talk in their own words about the subject. Recording podcasts makes little demand on researchers' time and can be done over the phone, and so will enable and encourage a greater number of them to speak directly to the public. This will continue one of Plus's aims - to present the personal side of maths, an important tool in combatting the negative stereotype of mathematics and in providing role models for students. Plus podcasts will allow us to highlight the personal side of mathematics, with discussions with prominent mathematicians and with researchers from a variety of fields, industry and Plus authors. The proposal is to produce a series of at least 10 podcasts over 2007 and 2008, each around 15 minutes long: we are approaching this initially as an experimental pilot and development phase but hope to be able to increase the number of podcasts produced in this period if possible. The Plus site has been producing accessible and entertaining content promoting mathematics to the general public for 10 years, and now has an audience of over a hundred thousand readers including 3000 subscribers to their fortnightly newsletter. This experience communicating mathematics through the internet, in addition to frequently appearing on Radio 4's More or Less, provides a sound basis for developing and producing podcasts to communicate maths to the general public. The Plus website will provide an extensive resource to back up and widen the impact of the Plus podcasts and, in turn, the podcasts will themselves encourage a new audience to explore the other resources on the site. A series of Plus podcasts will promote mathematics, engineering and physics to a new and growing audience - stimulating the public's interest in current research and inspiring the next generation of mathematicians, engineers and physical scientists.