Mutating Messages - A Public Experiment

The question But how do you actually DO research? is probably familiar to every researcher - not least those working in Mathematics or Statistics. It can be difficult to give a good answer - we might talk about thought experiments being the same as physical experiments, but this is still an abstract explanation. This proposal aims to answer the question with a concrete example. Through an interactive experiment called 'Mutating Messages', we will ask a secondary school class to produce data which will actually be used to verify cutting edge, EPSRC supported scientific research. During a second visit, we will involve the class in drawing appropriate scientific conclusions and discussing the potential benefits of the research area. Through a Facebook page, we will keep in touch with the class well into their next academic year. Of course we expect them to tell their friends, but a professional video will also capture the experiment and make it accessible to everybody through the internet. We will provide online teaching resources so that any Mathematics class teacher can recreate the experiment in their own classroom. The experiment will be developed in partnership with The Swinton High School, to ensure maximum educational benefit. It will reinforce key areas of the GCSE Mathematics curriculum including algebra, geometry and statistics. Online teaching resources will offer lessons based around the experiment, but targeted at different educational key stages - from descriptive studies for younger classes, to an 'A' level lesson offering more advanced topics. A professional video production company will ensure high video production values, to make the content more accessible. Existing outreach channels at the Investigators' respective Universities will be used to advertise the web resources to local schools, and the web content will be made available to the widest possible audience.

Who will the project reach? This project is in partnership with Ms Ellen Pope, deputy headmaster of The Swinton High School (TSHS), who teaches the class concerned, and also with the support of the head of the mathematics department at TSHS. Through web content we aim to reach secondary school students and their teachers; web hits will inevitably also come from the general public, although we do not specifically target the general public in this proposal. We hope that indirectly we will also encourage other academics, by the success of this public engagement model: a few focussed activities to reach a smaller audience, coupled to high quality online media to reach many. What effect will it have? In the short term, this project aims to help people understand empirical science better. One valuable effect would be convincing more students to consider university applications to the mathematical sciences; this goal of widening access fits well with the aims of our Universities' outreach programmes, with whom we will work (see below). We also hope to improve public perceptions of scientists and their work. In the longer term this will contribute to the number of relevant graduates and postgraduates, and thus serve industry. We believe that this proposal will foster links with TSHS enduring into the future. How will this effect be achieved? Engagement with the class at TSHS will be achieved by on-site visits for the two one-hour lessons described in this proposal, together with a Facebook page moderated by JM and class teacher EP throughout the project (in particular, long after the second visit). Broader engagement with other school students will be achieved through the project video and web resources, which are designed for general consumption. Our intent is that the video will be short and have high production values, to make access to the material easy for a broader audience, and to draw viewers in to the more technically rich content on the webpage. The online teaching resources will increase the educational range: the lesson plans will be based around the experiment, but targeted at different educational key stages - from descriptive studies for younger classes, to an 'A' level lesson involving inversion of covariance matrices. These web resources will be actively disseminated to schools through the existing school outreach channels at our respective Universities. The SCL team at JM's Department in Manchester, for example, has a mailing list of over 400 schoolteachers. The video will be posted on youtube, metacafe and google video and will contain a built-in link to the web page. TSHS has a web page on which the video link can be posted and associated with a short article. In addition, JM is part of the EPSRC NOISEmakers programme, whose website http://www.noisemakers.org.uk/ has videos centrally featured on the main page. We will link the video and project web page to our research and publication pages on our websites, and from our Functional Phylogenies project website. We have given a conservative estimate of reaching 800 individuals within a year of completing the website. This is based on the current reach of our own Universities' schools access programmes; the rate at which we receive hits on our own websites; and the popularity of youtube videos provided by universities, EPSRC and popular scientists. Obviously the heavy-tailed nature of the distribution of video popularities make robust forecasts of impact via the web challenging. We will reach out to public communication forums via the Big-chat e-mail list, the psi-com gateway and the PCST mailing list. We will reach out to teachers via forums at teachers.tv, the association of teachers of mathematics, and teachernet. In addition, NSJ is developing a website in which members of the public can help demystify difficult concepts.