The Earth and Sky Tour: Building capacity for hyperlocal STEM engagement with astronomy at hubs in England and Wales

Since 2015, SMASHfestUK has developed from a small local STEM festival in SE London, to a programme of year-round interactive engagements. For 2017/18 we have received funding (UK Space Agency and Royal Academy of Engineering) to pilot activities outside London in other underserved communities.
We are partnering with Swansea Science Festival/University to create a SMASHfestUK in Neath - a post-industrial mining town in the South Wales valleys.

Neath is a Communities First area (Welsh Government) and a key target area for the South West Wales Reaching Wider partnership, (Swansea University lead), to engage people who will be unlikely to engage with the main festival.

We wish to "capacity build" there; creating a team of local leaders, engaged researchers, activists and young explainers and will train them in the delivery of events previously run in London, ("asteroid," "solar storm" and "supervolcano").

RAE/UKSA funding covers some production costs of the Earth and Sky Tour but excludes the STFC-lead 'Young Explainer' (YE) programme, (successfully piloted in 2016 with 2 of that cohort now studying physics BSc. Our next step for this programme; 'Young Innovators'.) and capacity building within new communities.

YI's recruited from schools in Neath will work on 'Space Camp', exploring the science of space exploration & how we populate space & other planets and rebuild if a disaster means leaving Earth. Activities will include:

Asteroid exhibition (Partner: Royal Observatory Greenwich)
How to make asteroids (workshops)
Solar Stargazing with local astronomers
Build a rocket using fizzy drinks bottles.
Building communications system (crystal radios, optic fibre morse code).
Navigation (building and using sextants, creating earth and sky maps).
Air and water filtering and recycling.
Design & engineer a spaceport/satellite/space habitat/space debris capture systems.

Where the YE programme is focuses on education & facilitation of events, YIs will work on co-creating a major interactive 'Living in Space' installation for SMASHfestUK 2018.

"Living in Space" will begin in Neath, then connect YIs from Wales with those from London through joint workshops supported by Middlesex University Department of Design Engineering & Mathematics, Swansea University, University of Greenwich Creative Industries, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Deptford Green School D&T Department & Dominic Wilcox's Young Inventors programme. MDXDEM & Greenwich will lead on direct development, manifestation & building of their space inventions with the YIs. Swansea University will consult on science & engineering, as will Rutherford Appleton Lab.

Deptford Green School D&T students will partner with YIs, MDXDEM undergraduate students & professional scientists & engineers, to design & develop elements of "Living in Space". Dominic Wilcox's Young Inventors programme will partner & work with design ideas & inventions to feed into the development thinking, from participating primary schools. As part of the YI scheme, we'll pilot CREST certification, to ensure quality & give external validation to the YIs experiences. The programme will create a unique technical & creative ecology of STEM activists, ranging from primary school, through secondary, post-secondary, university & through to senior professional, working on a unique space-focussed, STEM public engagement project with an overarching narrative.

This rolling out of the SMASHfestUK engagement model (narrative-lead & inquiry driven, designed to increase science capital in its audience) outside London to test its robustness, & the development of the YE model to "Young Innovators, is the last element of evidence gathering in our present phase. If evidence supports this work, we will be building on this by applying for larger grant funding (large awards from STFC, Big Lottery, Wellcome Trust Society Award) for 2018 onwards in order to become sustainable long term.

As with the SMASHfestUK pilot event, everything we do is catalogued and recorded and will be uploaded onto the SMAShfestUK website. All learning materials will be distributed free of charge to schools and through our extensive social media networks. We are members of several science communications organisations and this will also be a distribution route for any educational resources and materials.

All learning materials created and produced as part of SMASHfestUK are distributed freely to schools and teachers.

SMASHfestUK was the winner of the NCCPE ENGAGE award for STEM in November 2016 and since then we have been building partnerships with many organisations in order to build capacity for other local communities to create SMASHfestUK activities in their own areas. As part of this we are creating "handbooks" documenting the practical aspects of how we have put on previous festivals in London (asteroid, solar storm and supervolcano)

The outputs of the public engagement grants include the production of papers for peer reviewed journals in the realm of public engagement and science communication and science education. SMASHfestUK methodology has already been delivered at several academic conferences

We are also creating a published resource for schools and families and universities around science and engineering, working with ten engineers from the Royal Academy of Engineering Ingenious Scheme. The resource will detail routes into science and engineering careers and study, case studies, contacts and practical demonstrations and experiments and activities for use by facilitators, teachers and scientists carrying out public engagement, in the classroom and/or at other events.

We will also be setting up a dedicated Vimeo and Youtube channel for dissemination of information and gathering of submissions for co-created community and collaborative projects related to the science and engineering contained in SMASHfestUK.

SMASHfestUK is now entering its third year we have accumulated 3 themes worth of teaching, learning, interactive games and experiments each relating to a different theme (asteroid, solar storm, volcano). We are in the process of assimilating the information and instructions we have produced during this time into an online resource for project based teaching and learning, and also for dissemination of a "manual" so that other universities and organisations can develop and deliver SMASHfestUK experiences in their own local communities.