When Shane McCracken launched the student-led STEM enrichment activity, I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here! in 2008, he was in for a few surprises. “Contrary to many myths, we found that scientists are often great communicators – in fact, they’re even better than most politicians,” he quips. “What also blew us away was that we thought it was going to be all about engaging kids and helping them understand science better,” McCracken adds. “ What we hadn’t factored in was how scientists would benefit from participating.”
The initiative, based in the UK, delivers super-curricular online activities that deepen subject knowledge by connecting school students with working scientists. Since its launch, the number of scientists who have signed up to participate has grown from 15 to roughly 9,000, and activities have taken place around the world, in places such as Australia, Malaysia, Kenya, the United States, Vietnam and Germany.
“The reality is, it’s the right thing to do,” says McCracken of the idea to put students in the driver’s seat. “As Brexit taught us, if we fail to engage everyone in society, then divisions will form and society will suffer.”
The 2016 Brexit referendum divided the UK on economic, educational and social lines. A key finding of a report by UK charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was that support for leaving the European Union was “75% among those who lacked qualifications, but just 27% among those who had achieved the highest level of education”.
With this in mind, McCracken was keen to understand the impact of people’s locations on the quality of STEM outreach they have access to. “We surveyed science teachers and schools if they had been visited by university scientists in the past 12 months,” he says. Using data from the route-building app TravelTime (formerly iGeolise), it soon became clear that “distance does matter”. Nearly 70% of schools within a 15-minute drive of a university had been visited by university scientists, the study found, but schools more than 30 minutes away were visited less than half as often. As half of UK schools are a 30-minute or more drive away from the nearest research-intensive university, there was a clear issue.
The study’s findings are supported by a 2022 report commissioned by the British Science Association, which found that science engagement ‘hot spots’ are “predominantly in large cities, where there is a significant and long-standing science infrastructure”. ‘Cold spots’, the report states, tend to be “coastal and rural areas and former industrial heartlands, where there is limited science infrastructure”.
McCracken’s current priority for I’m a Scientist is reaching those schools are “a bit further away”, he says.
How it works
I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here! has three main stakeholders: scientists, funders, and schools (students and teachers). When a teacher signs up for a 30-minute session, and an invite is sent to the scientists network, based on their area of expertise. Up to six scientists can join the session. The students can log onto an online platform, view the scientists’ photographs and profiles, and fire away text-based questions in real time.
Students get to ask questions of a real scientist – not someone they’ve come across in their normal lives, but someone who might be finding a cure for cancer,” says McCracken. “That is enormously powerful.”
A key component, says McCracken, is keeping things fun with a bit of healthy competition. Currently the project is organised into zones, which last for four weeks. Teachers book the sessions but students decide the questions, on absolutely any subject, and they vote on which scientist will win. Each zone is populated by up to 50 scientists and around 1,500 students, and has one winner who receives a £500 (roughly AU$1,000) prize.
It’s clear that the schools and scientists love the initiative, says McCracken, but the challenge now is to convince funders that it’s imparting meaningful benefits. Increasingly, funders want to see long-term evidence of impact, which can be tricky.
How it started
McCracken, who has a background in advertising and marketing, modelled I’m a Scientist on I’m a Councilor, Get Me Out of Here!, an online event he launched in 2003. I’m a Councilor was inspired by a reality television show called I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, At the time, idea of putting the audience in control was gaining traction, and viewers could vote to eject participants based on their performance in testing jungle circumstances.
In launching I’m a Councilor, McCracken wanted to flatten hierarchies and empower young people by connecting them directly with local government councilors.
He realised that the same principle could apply to STEM outreach. As with local councilors, McCracken noticed “a gap between the people [who were] practicing the science and the people for whom it is practiced”. It was a top-down system that involved the expert (a government official or scientist) going into a classroom to deliver a presentation. “Typically, you would have just three students raising their hands to answer a question,” he says. He wanted to change the status quo.
McCracken took his latest idea to UK charity the Wellcome Trust to apply for funding and got the go-ahead to create a pilot programme. “It was brilliant,” he says. “It worked really, really well – even better than I’m a Councilor.”
Not everyone was convinced by his idea, McCracken recalls. “There was an eminent science-communication professor [on the Wellcome Trust panel] who expressed his doubts, that not enough scientists would sign up for it.” But, right from the outset, the initiative has proven to be a mutually beneficial collaboration for both students and scientists, he says.
The numbers tell the story. Over 9,000 scientists have applied to take part in projects running across five continents. I am Scientist was also voted joint winner of the inaugural 2018 Fallings Walls Engage programme.
Preparing for the future
In the UK, government is applying increasing pressure on schools to deliver student activities that boost career opportunities. As a result, I’m a Scientist will need to be structured differently in future, and from January 2024 schools will be more in control. “We are going to pour all of our scientists into one pot and enable teachers to choose,” McCracken explains. Specific sessions, on say genetics, for example, will be available throughout the year rather than for four weeks, as is currently the case.
The organisation is also committed to engaging scientists from diverse backgrounds. ”If you are trying to get all kids to relate to science, then you must get the basics right, whether it’s an issue of gender, ethnicity or many more subtle issues of diversity,” he says. In other words, children need to see people that reflect their own backgrounds succeeding.
In the UK, at least, STEM outreach has been well funded in recent years but now McCracken wants to take this further. In 2021, he and his team launched I’m an Engineer, and there have been one-off events, such as I’m an Astronaut. But he believes there is huge scope for programmes that engage medics, mathematicians, geographers, historians, designers, “to broaden young people’s horizons and their opportunities in life”.
I am a Scientist model continues to grow – between 2017 and 2021, it connected over 40,000 students with more than 1,600 scientists. On a recent visit to a UK primary school, McCracken was reminded why the why. The teacher who had signed her class up for a session nodded in the direction of a student who was struggling with verbal communication. For this teacher, the beauty of the text-and-web based I’m a Scientist programme is that it takes the anxiety out of asking questions. “Because it’s anonymous, because it’s about the scientist, 91% of students who have an account use it to engage actively,” says McCracken. “They’re not passive about what the scientists are saying. They’re invested in it.”
Story by Pamela Whitby