Public Outreach at RAL: Engaging the Next Generation of Scientists and Engineers

Not scheduled
15m
OIST

OIST

1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Kunigami-gun Okinawa, Japan 904-0495
poster presentation Track6: Facilities, Infrastructure, Network

Speaker

George Ryall (STFC)

Description

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is part of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The Royal Charter that established the STFC requires us to generate public awareness and encourage public engagement and dialogue in relation to the science we undertake. We firmly support this activity as it is important to encourage the next generation of students to consider studying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects, providing the UK with a highly skilled work-force in the future. To this end, we undertake a variety of outreach activities. We will describe the outreach activities undertaken by RAL, particularly focussing on those of the Scientific Computing Department. These activities include: an Arduino based activity day for 12-14 year olds to celebrate Ada Lovelace day; running a centre as part of the Young Rewired State – encouraging 11-18 year olds to created web applications with open data; sponsoring a team in the Engineering Education Scheme – supporting a small team of 16/17 year olds to solve a real world engineering problem we set them; as well as the more traditional tours of our facilities. We believe these activities could serve as an example for other sites involved in scientific computing around the globe.

Primary authors

George Ryall (STFC) Ian Peter Collier (STFC - Rutherford Appleton Lab. (GB)) James Adams (STFC RAL) Dr Sophy Palmer (STFC)

Co-authors

Presentation materials