175 minutes for chemistry
These activities count towards your 175 minutes. Find out how we're celebrating our 175th anniversary, and tell us your story here.
Chemistry underpins every aspect of modern life, from the water we drink and the food we eat, all the way to the major global challenges of today and tomorrow.
Why is outreach important?
Each of us has our own reasons for wanting to communicate chemistry:
- Do you believe that a supply of skilled chemists can secure our future prosperity?
- Do you think that chemistry should inform the way people vote or the things they buy?
- Do you need to engage with non-chemists to help your career?
- Or do you just want to share the wonder of chemistry with the world?
We have got the evidence to demonstrate that our activities make a difference. If you want to get involved, then we can get you started and help you develop your skills.
Wherever possible, our work to engage people with chemistry is grounded in solid social science. Where that is not possible, we support programmes that will generate the necessary evidence.
Public attitudes to chemistry
Our long-term ambition is to shift the image of chemistry and raise the profile of chemists. Before we can try to do that it is critically important that we understand public attitudes towards chemistry and find out about people's knowledge, interest and engagement with the work that we all do. We must build our understanding of public opinion and exposure to chemistry.
We recently commissioned in-depth qualitative and quantitative research to investigate public attitudes to chemistry. This has allowed us to explore public opinion and the way people imagine chemistry, and will enable us to strategically focus our public activities to maximise our efforts.
Read about the research findings, and read RSC past president David Phillips’s response to the research.
Chemistry for all
Our Chemistry for All project is exploring and addressing the barriers to participation in UK chemistry undergraduate study. The five year project will cost around £1million and will study the effects of a long-term series of activities, rather than the one-off activities that are so often the focus of chemistry enhancement and enrichment activity.
The activities will be run by teams at universities with innovative approaches to widening participation in chemistry: Liverpool John Moores; Nottingham Trent; Reading and Southampton in partnership; and Warwick. Each university will work with six schools from local areas with low university participation.
A separate research project run by a team from The Institute of Education, University of London (IoE), will explore the impact of the project on the students who take part, following them from Year 8 through to Year 12, and possibly to undergraduate study, training or work. They will report on their intermediate findings as they go along, with a final report once the project comes to completion in Summer 2019.
Factors affecting public engagement by researchers
Together with 15 other organisations, we are researching how best to support public engagement with research. To help us understand the landscape, we are re-running the 2006 Royal Society Survey of factors affecting science communication to establish what has changed in the sector over the last 10 years, and to provide a benchmark for future developments.
The organisations involved are research funders including the Wellcome Trust, all four UK Funding Councils, and Research Councils UK, alongside learned societies such as ourselves, the Royal Society, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The report was published in December 2015.
If you’re new to outreach and interested in engaging with different audiences about chemistry, taking those first steps can sometimes be a bit daunting. We’ve come up with some top tips and resources to help get you started.
Start a conversation…
Whether you are based in industry, academia or education it always helps to talk to someone who has done this before. We have a regional network of Education Coordinators that can offer advice and are just a click or a phone call away.
Alternatively, many organisations also have people and departments that can help. Teams that you may already be familiar with include Knowledge Transfer, Marketing and Communication, Volunteering, Widening participation and public engagement.
Join an existing network or scheme
Many online mailing lists and forums exist to encourage people to discuss and share public engagement experiences. Psci-Com and Big-Chat are active mailing lists that offer the opportunity to share best practice, promote upcoming events and discuss science communication topics of the moment.
The NCCPE Public Engagement Network is dedicated to those based in higher education and provides support for both staff and students to develop their public engagement work.
Start small and give it a go
The biggest hurdle to trying something new is often just finding the right way to get started, so the key to success is sometimes to start small. We have lots of opportunities for everyone to get involved, both face-to-face and online.
Other ways to get started include:
- Writing a science blog
- Volunteering in a local science centre
- Participating in a science festival
Our Local Sections organise and participate in a huge variety of activities aimed at both school and public audiences and may have opportunities to get involved. Get in touch with the Local Section chair for your area to find out more.
Activities
Part of the excitement and fun of engaging different audiences with the chemical science is the reaction of the audience to hands-on activities and demonstrations. If you’re stuck for ideas visit our outreach collection on Learn Chemistry. Here you can find anything from kitchen chemistry to the latest global experiment.
Organise your own event
If you’ve participated in a few activities you may be ready to have a go at organising an event yourself.
Before you start, these are the questions that you should ask yourself:
- What are the aims of your activity? Why are you doing it?
- Who is your audience? Why should they care?
- What are you planning to do?
- How will you evaluate it? How will you know it was a success?
If you think you know the answer then a good place to start to find more information is Plan it on the NCCPE website.
