New Year – New Schools

We kicked off another academic year in Ireland with lots of new schools in the North West and around Dublin.

The postgrad team in ATU Sligo undertook the long journey up to Letterkenny to meet the students in Loreto, as well as a trip over to Mayo to meet everyone at Gortnor Abbey. The team in Trinity on the other hand have undertook lots of shorter journeys to schools who didn’t get a workshop last year due to high demand. They visited CBS Westland Row, Drimnagh Castle, St. Kevins College, St. Benildus College, Pobalscoil Neasain and a few more.

We have nearly caught up with the backlog so we can now get back in touch with our new applications for the new academic year

International School Workshops

We have kicked off another academic year of school workshops, but this time in Belgium! The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Belgium Local Section kindly invited us over to run workshops with two international schools. You can read their blog post about the trip here:

https://rscbelgium.blogspot.com/2023/10/current-chemistry-investigates-movies.html

The funding for the trip was provided by the RSC Belgium local section, with John, Natalia and Fiona giving up their time to run the workshops at a very busy time of year. We ran two workshops with A-level and International Baccalaureate (IB) students in the British School of Brussels on the first day, and John also presented his “Chemistry in the Movies” talk at the annual prize giving ceremony. We then ran another two workshops with IB students at St. Johns International School in Waterloo on the second day of the trip.

Thanks again to the RSC Belgium Local section for having us, we learned so much about international schools and we also got lots of positive feedback from students and teachers.

PhD Training for the new Academic Year

Our CCI workshops are run by PhD researchers (Ambassadors) from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Sligo. To ensure that our workshops continue to meet the highest quality in terms of informal education, we provide training for our PhD researchers in the form of Science Communication, informal education, public engagement and resource development.

ATU Sligo kicked off the training for the new academic year with a training workshop for new PhD starters at the University, with experienced PhD ambassadors providing their insights from the previous academic year. In TCD, the annual Education and Public Engagement (EPE) module has also started with 10 new PhDs signed up to take part in the training programme with runs throughout the year. The TCD programme also includes lectures and a team project to develop new ideas and resources for schools and the public.

The benefits for PhD researchers of doing informal education and public engagement activities like Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) are numerous. The CCI programme helps our PhD ambassadors develop their public speaking, science communication, teaching and teamwork skills among many others. It also creates a sense of community among researchers to share ideas and develop peer support.

Best of luck to all the new PhD ambassadors, we are delighted to have you on the programme!

CCI Town Hall Meeting and First Publication

At the end of August we were delighted to gather everything together for our first ever “CCI Symposium” or “Town Hall” meeting. We had project coordinators, facilitators and PhD ambassadors all together for the day in Trinity College Dublin. We also had some new partners with us from UCC Chemistry, Tyndall and Lifetime Lab. We spent the day making improvements to our school workshops, adjusting questions and going through all the data we collected.

The first data from the project is now available in our first publication from the project in the Journal of Chemical Education. The paper is open access to ensure that all of our partners are able to see the data they helped us collect: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00515

Dublin Maker 2023

After a very positive experience at Dublin Maker 2022, we returned this year with our battery maker micro workshop. We brought with us a significant amount of experience from numerous other events that we attended since June 2022, which really benefited us in terms of crowd control and engagement levels this year. The festival changed location and date this year from Merrion Square to Inchicore and from June to September, but it actually got an even bigger crowd with over 10,000 people joining us.

Well done to Natalia, Ellen, Tanya, Blaithin and Keith for all their hard work sparking conversations with all ages. We directly engaged with over 1000 people during the day and got overwhelmingly positive feedback through our 5-point smiley face stand.

Huge thank you to the Sligo team for travelling all the way over to us to help the Trinity Team to engage with so many people. Collaboration is a very important part of the project so we are always delighted when we get the opportunity to work together. Thanks once again to the Trinity College Dublin Estate team for their ongoing support of our project through their access to the campus for collecting and dropping off our equipment. Thanks also to the Dublin Maker organisers for having us again and well done to all of them for putting together such a hugely successful festival.

Green Energy Resource

Huge thank you to Inigo Iribarren for his work on this new poster highlighting the ground breaking and historical contributions Ireland has made towards Green Energy over the past 100 years. It starts with the building of Ardnacrusha hydro power station in 1929, through to the hugely important pumped storage station at Turlough Hill and also includes more recent developments such as the hydrogen powered buses which are running in Dublin, and built in Co. Antrim. Printed versions of this poster are given to all schools after each workshop we run, and we have A1 and A0 size versions available.

We also handed out about 100 copies at the ISTA conference in Limerick, and another 100 at the Cork Carnival of Science. We have a few hundred left for upcoming events and if you haven’t got one yet come find us at the ChemEd-Ireland conference in Trinity in October for another chance to grab one.

Also, over the summer of 2023, while many of us enjoyed some well deserved time off, we embarked on a little project to translate the poster into Irish. Huge thanks to Niamh O’Shea at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) for translating the poster into Irish. We will now do a short print run of the Irish language version for anyone who wants it and once we run out of English language ones, we will print double sided versions with English on one side and Irish on the other. Both versions are freely available to download below as PDFs.

irish_a1Download
a1Download

Cork Carnival of Science 2023

Our PhD ambassadors are key to the success of our Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) project. As well as helping everyone learn more about green energy, we also provide tangible role models for budding young scientists. Our team of 8 brilliant PhD researchers from Trinity College Dublin & Atlantic Technological University Sligo “sparked conversations” with about 2000 people at the Cork Carnival of Science again for the second year in a row. Thank you to all of our PhD ambassadors for their enthusiasm, professionalism and generosity with this time.

They are all inspiring Role Models – we had many children return to us for more chats! Thank you to Science Foundation Ireland for their support & to the Tánaiste Michael Martin TD for visiting our stand as well. Also, well done to our Royal Society of Chemistry undergrad summer student Dearbhla who undertook a detailed survey with participants about our activities and their interactions with our PhD ambassadors. The feedback we gathered was overwhelmingly positive and we look forward to publishing the results for everyone to see very soon.

 #ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland. #ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland

Leinster School Workshops

Our Trinity College Dublin team have been extremely busy this academic year, with over 30 schools visited all over Leinster and some in Munster too. Here are a collection of photos from some of our most recent school visits to CBA Naas in Co. Kildare, Kilkenny College, Temple Carrig School in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, St. Leo’s in Carlow, Coolmine Community College in west Dublin, Blackrock College in South Dublin and Clongowes College in Co. Kildare.

The CCI workshops provide hands on practical experience, real-world context for the curriculum and tangible role models. Thank you to all of our PhD researchers for giving up their time to inspire the next generation of scientists. Thank you also to all the teachers for partnering with us and inviting us into their school and lab. And finally, thank you to all the support staff in Trinity College Dublin and ATU Sligo for making these workshops possible every week.

Wrapping up for the Academic Year

Our first ever full academic year is now coming to an end with the last few workshops running through the month of May. It’s incredible that this time last year we were running our first pilot workshops in a handful of schools. From those tentative first steps we took on board all the advice provided to us by the great teachers involved in our pilots and improved every part of the workshop before we launched it officially in Sept 2022.

Since then, it has gone from strength to strength. We will be doing a wrap up post about the whole academic year soon, but for now here are some great pictures by the ATU Sligo team of their recent visit to Manorhamilton in lovely Leitrim. Well done to the PhD ambassadors from both institutions for running high quality workshops all over Ireland this year!

UCC Chemistry Collaboration

At the end of April we travelled down south for the first of many collaborations with the University College Cork (UCC) School of Chemistry for the UCC Access Programme. We ran our CCI secondary school workshop with a great bunch of Transition Year students in the science labs in UCC from multiple Cork schools. It was also great to have about a dozen UCC PhD researchers helping us and special thanks to the head of UCC chemistry Prof Anita Maguire for visiting the workshop.

Thanks to UCC staff members Dr Dave Otway and Will Daly for organizing the event and for inviting us down. We also followed up the UCC workshop with a trip to a local school in the afternoon to run another workshop with the Transition Year students of Regina Mundi College. So it was a very successful trip to Cork and it was great to catch up with so many people!

The featured picture is L-R: Dr Dave Otway (UCC), Prof Anita Maguire (UCC), Dr John O’Donoghue (TCD) and Dr Natalia Garcia Domenech (TCD).