Outreach: How Science Week's 2025 theme made me reflect on how I talk about science (by Dr Katherine Brimblecombe)

For the last three years I’ve been going to my son’s primary school for science week, to speak with the children about what it’s like to be a scientist. This year’s (2025) theme for science week was “change and adapt”, so I decided to reflect on how my approach to discussing science with children and to lay audiences has adapted and changed over the last few years.

Discussing science with children has been a catalyst for improving my communication style, because my default method of communication - a 30 min PowerPoint presentation - isn’t an option! Therefore, I began to explore other ways to share my perspective as a scientist, specifically one who studies Parkinson’s. Before I spoke to classes of primary school children, I had met with Parkinson’s patient groups, and had defaulted to the dreaded PowerPoint presentation! Although, patient communities tend to be more forgiving than 8-year olds, I can now reflect that it was no more engaging for them than it would be for children! I have since identified three general pitfalls that need to be negotiated to successfully communicate science with broader audiences.

“The big picture”: It’s so tempting to focus immediately on the details of what you’ve been working on for the last year (or decade!), but it is really hard for audiences to follow your story without knowing the context of why you’re doing it. Ensuring you’re speaking to, rather than at, audiences is very important. This is especially true of patient groups, for whom it’s important to remember how isolating and dehumanising it can be to be spoken about in abstract terms.

“Technical language”: This is an obvious issue but notoriously hard to overcome! I like to tackle this problem by “being more Lego”. Lego pieces come in >70,000 different shapes, yet by sub-setting pieces, clearly defining them, and using helpful diagrams, all ages and abilities can engage with Lego kits, and therefore our science!

“Moving from 2D to 3D”: This was a real turning point for me, and I doubt would have happened without speaking to children. 3D props are fantastic! They break down barriers and increase participation. For school visits, I always take a P20 Gilson pipette and a falcon tube of water. I will never get tired of seeing how excited children get when you pipette 20 μL of water on their hand and explain that you would have to do that 500 times to get the amount of Calpol they take. (It’s a fun game of “higher or lower”, if you fancy feeling like a 1980s gameshow host!). For Parkinson’s patient groups, when I’m explaining my research about the role of calcium in selective vulnerability of dopamine neurons, I often take a block of cheese and a video of calcium metal reacting with water and ask if they can spot the connection. (I’ve yet to do the experiment in person, but one day I hope to!). This always starts everyone reminiscing about their old science experiments and immediately lifts the energy of the room!

So how did I incorporate these lessons into my latest visit? I wanted to break down what I do as a scientist, and realised that my research life can be broken down to three things! 1) Measure something; 2) Put things into categories; and 3) Ask questions about what changes those measurements or categories. I told the students that although science is fun and exciting, it can be difficult and sometimes overwhelming. I tried to reassure the students that focusing on one of these broad questions (measuring, categorising or asking questions) is helpful to not get overwhelmed by a problem that can feel overwhelmingly complicated. I demonstrated some of the measurements I make: using a pipette to measure volume, a stage micrometer and microscope to measure distance, and multimeter to measure electricity (they had a go at finding the dead battery, which luckily, I had plenty of at home!)

Then we played a game of putting things into categories: a potato, apple, piece of wire, piece of cotton, pine cone, lego brick, golf ball and tennis ball. I brought 3 coloured hoops representing “floats in water”, “is man-made”, and “is green”. The children voted which objects go in which hoop. We then discussed how fixed these categories are: “How could can we make something more floaty?”, “would mashed potato be man-made?”, “can something be more or less green”?

Lastly, we got onto some neuroscience! I was generously loaned a model skull by Professor Molnar from the department and I asked the children to guess what kind of scientist I am. I then showed some cartoons of different neurons (retinal bipolar cell, cerebellar Purkinje cell, motor neuron and dopamine neuron). We discussed their similarities and differences and what their job might be in the brain. I then showed them a print of Cajal’s drawings and explained how Cajal used similar observational and questioning skills to understand the brain and win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. I left the visit feeling energised and engaged, and fully feel it was worth my time. I hope the children enjoyed it too.

KRB
April 2025