REPORT
Thank you everyone: the scores of volunteers who helped make it all run smoothly, the hundreds of presenters, the new and varied organizations that made it twice as big this year as last year. Thanks also to Mathilda Gregory, Eiluned Jones, Emily Dubberley, Drew Scobie, Nina Garner, Ruth Harper, Nadine Barber and William Barre-Older, who organized it all. And our sponsors, without whom nothing would be possible. Richard Robinson (Director)
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Brighton Science Festival 2014. As the economy begins to revive businesses are set to expand. Where will they find quality? Look no further than the graduates of the Science Festival! However, the our seekers after knowledge can’t see any evidence of revival yet in their finances - our events got smaller audiences this year. So with less cash in the punters’ pockets, how will the Festival survive? Science is important for life and essential for work. Help us to put it not only into schools, but into the community, the streets and the home. Here we gratefully glance leftward to the Festival partners whose talks and demonstrations delighted our public this year, and to our sponsors, who support us with seriously needed cash. We are grateful to you all. It is thanks to you that when companies are looking for the graduate engineers, chemists, doctors, designers, architects and teachers of tomorrow, they’ll find them here in Sussex, on their doorstep. There were nearly 50% more events in 2014 than in 2013 (75 against 46). That is serious growth. Butit wasn’t all our own work. Other organisers are beginning to find that the word 'science' includes the subtext 'explosive, dangerous, mind-bending, counter-intuitive, chaotic, important, life-enhancing, scary, magical, exhilarating', so many groups are riding the wave and mounting their own shows. The result is great diversity, with the science of magic, science poetry, science-art collaboration, and science-informed debate and discussions all over town. Last year we conducted some experiments. This year we acted on the results: We modified the teens’ programme, arranging workshops in central Brighton during half term. The pictures tell their own story, of the important comraderie you get from parents and peers, as an important complement to school science lessons. In all, the week attracted 4000 people to central Brighton. And the Pocket Science Festival toured out of Brighton, to Billingshurst, Crawley and Uckfield, reaching 700 in its three day outing. Both of these expansions need helpers in the future to fill the spaces provided. We are looking for volunteers from businesses, schools and colleges. In the pictures here and online, and in the videos, you will see the engagement of the young people, and the importance of the parents as guides and examples. And notice the large number of girls at the lower age range. Why somehow they must be chivvied as they get older, for something tends to disengage them from the age of twelve.
CONTENTS p 2 - Sponsors p 3 - Introduction p 4 - January schools tour p 5 - Bright Sparks p 6 - Half Term week pictures p 7 - Half Term week report p 8 - Pocket Science Festival p 9 - Adult programme p 10 - Statistics p 11 - statistics p 12 - Publicity p 13 - Accounts p 14 - Conclusion
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January schools tour A new schools workshop, created in honour of the 50th anniversary of the Moog Synthesizer, gave a thousand KS3 students in 15 schools county-wide a chance to experiment with creating electronic music through January. The annual January workshops are designed to draw out the students’ creativity, so while they are based on hard science (in this case the function of capacitors and resistors, plus the nature of sound), they aim to give the students fun, because enjoyment is the best motivator. Having experimented with making simple capacitors from tin cans and fast food containers the students learn to control the electricity flow with resistance wire. Then they make their own synthesizer, and after a little experimentation they play the Dr Who signature tune Our researches produced a unique workshop which is easy to run in classes anywhere. It is being written up for publication in educational journals and will be added to the Pocket Science Festival on future tours.
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Bright Sparks
Jon Simmons
Two days of Bright Sparks, over the first weekend of half term, for 2000 people at Hove Park Upper school. A lot of our time over the six months before it was devoted to finding and marshaling fifty presenters from London, Oxford, Reading, Southampton, Portsmouth, Brighton and the south-east, plus a hundred volunteers.
Jon Simmons
The presenters are expert and experienced educators, from schools, universities and businesses, who only come on condition that they will be exhausted by the end of the day with all the demonstrating and explaining they have to do.
Jon Simmons
The visitors are families. And not just the kids; parents are as important as their children, as sources of inspiration for the young ones. The activities have to be interesting for them as well . 70% of the adults are ‘professionals’ or teachers, and were eager to guide, help and encourage their children in the activities. Over 60% of visitors stayed for 3-5 hours. A tenth stayed for 6-7 hours.
Jon Simmons
The impact of the days on children’s development cannot be overrated.
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Francesca Moore
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Jack Beard
Half Term week
Events in central Brighton
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Francesca Moore
Francesca Moore
Ashley Laurence
Ashley Laurence
The chase which began last year, to find the best way to take the Bright Spark generation up to the next level as they grow older continues. Added to this is the need to keep girls on board. Thirty events through the week brought 4000 people into the centre of town; craft and technology games and challenges of varying difficulty, aimed at ages from toddler from teen, but with a bias toward the teen. They took place in pubs, clubs and small venues, with an average of 200 people passing through each venue per 5-hour day This year there seemed to be a sense in the air that everyone needed to learn how to programme, so there was a lot of computing and robotics - LEGO Mindstorm and WeDo, Robot Wars, Hydrogen car challenges, Arduino guitars and of course Raspberry Pi. We helped Brighton Youth Centre and Exploring Senses mount a scintillating programme of activities targeting teens for the last Saturday of half term. BYC is going to be the focus of our attention for youth activities in next year’s Festival. It’s the right building in the right place.
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Pocket Science Festival tour to Crawley, Billingshurst and Uckfield The Pocket Science Festival is a compilation of successful schools’ tour workshops devised by Jonathan Hare and Richard Robinson, plus simple challenges, plus talks from Richard Robinson. This year we visited Crawley, Billingshurst and Uckfield, where we entertained 700 people. We have the long term ambition of stimulating the local community to mount their own events during the Festival. Pocket Science can add scale and help them attract a bigger crowd. It also serves to flag up the main Festival events in Brighton. We received some criticism for the low number and skills of the assistants. Next year we will raise the standard, pay some staff and find local volunteers to assist on the fairground. The Pocket Science Festival is available all year for schools and socials, and travels around the country.
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Adult programme
Whose Web is it Anyway?
The Festival office runs to just fifteen events. But throughout February 61 events - three quarters of the entire Festival were organised by others, ranging from poetry recitals to Adam Rutherford and Creation exhibitions, cabaret and magic shows, dealing with the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, the dangers of internet data trawling and the relationship between Eastern mysticism and quantum physics. Hence the Festival grew by 50%. The independent sector is taking off. All we have to do is give it a little prod occasionally. Big Science Saturday
“God Doesn’t Play Dice”
The big day aims to explain Andrea Sella and Ice complex issues in a simple way; to exhilarate, enhance, educate and entertain. That it did. Ticket sales were slow as we approached the weekend, due to the recession tightening its grip on people’s wallets, but door sales were unexpectedly high, so numbers overall were on a par with last year. Big Science Sunday
The Festival of the Spoken Nerd
Simon Singh and The Simpsons
All the Fun of the Unfair was a Jim Al khalili’s Sunday Assembly whole day devoted to a single issue - the concept of fairness which combines science and ethics. The subject was pursued through bacteria, leguminous plants, capuchin monkeys, chimps, children and on as far as bankers. It appears all living things have a sense of fairness. This is one of the revelations that makes science so amazing.
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Trevor Cox’s Sonic Wonderland
Statistics Each year we look at different statistics - we can only ask so many questions of the public in our evaluations. If there are any other figures you would like to have, please ask. Total events - 75 (46 in 2013). The Festival keeps growing, in spite of our determination to do no more than previous years. A large part of the Festival was self organised. Thus you will frequently see low attendance numbers below: low numbers, when they occur, are due to the small size of venues or small class sizes. Mostly the events had full houses. We instigated 33 events of which we organised 15 (in bold below). Forty two were spontaneous initiatives, which is really gratifying. Total attendance was about 12,000 (10,500 in 2013).
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Big Science Weekend (above): The left hand chart above is a colourful way to say ‘no discernible trend’. What seems like a precipitous drop in student attendance this year, plus a leap in 60+ audiences, maybe just a statistical blip. We hope so: concession prices were lowered this year to encourage more attendance from students. It may be that the over-60s were the ones who took advantage. Comparing Big Science, with it’s wide range of talks, to All the Fun of the Unfair 5 1/2 hours on one topic (right) - shows a more mature audience tackling the big issues. Bright Sparks (left): Occupation of adults: We keep the prices low and many of the challenges easy, and we advertise mostly to the state sector, so there are no barriers to entry at Bright Sparks. But the audience has undergone a self-selection process over ten years (top left): the parents are 85% professional or teachers - and they are passing their commitment on to their children through example and encouragement. Ages: The ages peak at 8-10 yrs, but 18% are at the top end, 11-13 yrs, which fits with the mission. Entry for under 7s is free, because we don’t have aimed at them, but 28% are that young - brought with their older siblings - and seem to find enough to do without obstructing the core audience. Length of stay: A third of the crowd stayed for four or more hours, while 13% were there for 6 or more hours - a full day! Half term events in central Brighton were not sufficiently covered by evaluations to produce reliable statistics. These will be better organised next year to check trends. For the time being, the pictures must tell their own story. 11
Publicity Attendees who found out about the Festival through our online presence rose by 5% to 20% this year, so our use of digital media is now on a par with print in terms of effectiveness as a promotional tool. This is via our website (www.brightonscience.com), Facebook page, newsletter and Twitter account. Publicity is important not just because it advertises the Festival - it advertises SCIENCE. This year we spent 20% of the budget on publicity (£9,100). Word of Mouth is still the most important publicity agent. The newsletter is racing up, though. There are 6,000 subscribers to our monthly newsletter, covering social, political and scientific topics arising from Festival speakers research, other news stories of interest plus competitions and event information. The Festival Website; The website was a source of information for 75% of Festival visitors. This proportion has been steady for three years. So a quarter of our visitors rely on the printed word! Leaflets distributed through schools; 80,000 Festival leaflets giving details of the family days and the adult programmes were distributed to families in Sussex through all Sussex schools. Sixth Form and FE colleges received posters and booklets. Booklets; 25,000 12-page booklets and 1,000 posters were distributed in pubs, community centres, shops and cafes in Brighton, and in a circle of towns from Worthing, Horsham, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Lewes and Eastbourne, via Impact Distribution. Libraries and council offices, All of Sussex’s libraries and council offices displayed posters and booklets. Universities and colleges; Advertisements in the student papers; poster and booklet distribution through the departments and the calls for helpers, presenters and volunteers raised our profile in the Universities of Sussex and Brighton. Newspapers; The Argus were our local media partners, and Latest TV were constantly on demand for reviews, interviews with Simon Singh, Adam Rutherford, Trevor Cox and others. Local papers around Sussex promoted the Schools workshops. Magazines; Adverts and articles appeared in regional magazines, educational magazines and Brighton area magazines, including editorial features in Latest 7. Also Kemptown Rag, Primary Times, ABC Magazine, Seven Dials Directory, Regency Magazine, Magnet, Preston Pages, Sussex Uni Bulletin, Sussex Life, Viva Brighton, Teen File, The Scene, Business Edge, The Whistler and BN1.
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Accounts Full accounts will be available later. A rough analysis is below. Venue hire was down, thanks to the generosity of the University of Brighton, Latest Music and Blind Tiger. Administration costs rose, due to the administration team taking more of the director’s workload. This was possible because of continuity from one year to the next. But it still leaves us very far from secure. A lot has to be done between Festivals (writing this report being just one), and £3,700 is not enough. I rely on good will. I would like to have something more stable to rely on.
Festival
2012
2013
2014
Production costs
8,000
11,000
9,300
School tour
1,300
1,300
1,700
Publicity printing, distribution, ads etc
9,700
10,100
9,600
500
1,500
2,000
Staff costs
9,000
12,000
14,500
Director’s fee
4,000
4,000
4,000
COSTS
Office expenses
KTN Summer project
2,100
Interim planning costs
8,000
1,900
______
______
__
40,500
49,000
46,900
Ticket sales
18,700
25,000
24,800
Sponsorship
20,700
22,600
20,700
1,100
1,400
1,400
______
______
__
40,500
49,000
46,900
Total
3,700
INCOME
Schools Total
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2015 Anniversaries As ever, we look at the anniversaries to give us themes. As ever, the history books provide: Magna Carta (1215); vending machines (1615 and 215 BC (sic)); Fire extinguisher (1715); Battle of Waterloo (1815); Guided missile, poison gas, neon advertising, sonar, Women’s Institute (1915); Kyoto Protocol (2005).
IS IT WORTH IT? Is there enough science, design, craft, engineering or technology happening at home? Is STEM provision good enough in schools? Are there enough graduates and school leavers with the necessary interest and skills? OK, so it is worth it.
MANAGING GROWTH Can it grow more? Yes, if others help it grow, as they did this year. Yes, if the Pocket Science Festival can help spread the idea further into Sussex. Yes, if schools follow Portslade Academy’s lead and try their own Science Fun Days. Yes, if the funding can keep an administrator administrating.
Contact: Richard Robinson, 18 Temple Street BN1 3BH richard@BrightonScience.com 01273 777 628
www.BrightonScience.com
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